Studies in Philosophy and Literature

Beginning with Plato’s response to the tragic poets, and continuing through the work of figures such as Hegel and Nietzsche, the development of philosophy in the Western tradition has been intimately linked to the fate of tragedy.  Indeed, it could be said that philosophy has always had to contend with tragedy.  What forces have determined the philosophical responses to tragedy?  This seminar will center around constellations of tragedy and philosophy and will concentrate on the question:  what might tragedy know that philosophy seems to suppress?  Special attention will be paid to issues in moral philosophy, aesthetics, epistemology, and the philosophy of the social sciences.  We will begin with a reading of Oedipus Rex and Antigone in conjunction with works by Plato, Aristotle, and Hegel, and will proceed from there to the early modern period and to modernity, reading Shakespeare, Racine, and Calderón in conjunction with Descartes and Hume.  We will explore Kant on the sublime, Walter Benjamin on the Trauerspiel, and Stanley Cavell on problems of knowing and acknowledging.  In considering the history of tragedy we will also take up the matter of its entanglement with other genres, including the novel and opera, reading works by Nietzsche (The Birth of Tragedy) and Zizek and Dolar (Opera’s Second Death) in relation to L’Orfeo and Wagnerian opera.  Time and student interest permitting, the seminar will conclude by re-visiting the problem of the pleasures of tragedy in relation to psychoanalysis and the question of recognition in contemporary social and political contexts.