Greek Drama at the Movies
This course was available in the past and may be presented again as part of the Master of Liberal Arts curriculum.
Western theater, as an art form and a cultural institution, traces its origin back to the Greek tragedies and comedies produced two and a half millennia ago by poets and citizen choruses competing for prizes in an annual festival at Athens in honor of the god Dionysus. And in our own time, filmmakers continue to take the ancient Greek mythological dramas of Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, and Aristophanes as models, intertexts, points of reference, springboards of inspiration, and models for adaptation and innovation. In this course we will study ten of the most powerful classical Greek performance texts as we view and discuss a set of film adaptations spanning more than fifty years of cinema history and ranging from “faithful” attempts to recreate Athenian performance conventions in masks and gowns, to imagined “historical” recreations in the sword and sandal genre, to European new wave and postmodern deconstructions, and to transcultural reworkings that represent the tragic chorus as a gospel choir or Athenian soldiers as gang members fighting on the streets of Chicago.
- Fulfills the Elective - General requirement
- Fulfills the Elective - Literary Studies requirement
- This course is a part of the Literary Studies concentration
About the Professor
David Wray
David Wray is is an associate professor in the Department of Classics, the Department of Comparative Literature, and the College. He is the author of Catullus and the Poetics of Roman Manhood (Cambridge 2001), a coeditor of Seneca and the Self (Cambridge 2009), and is currently writing Ovid at the Tragic Core of Modernity. His research and teaching interests include Hellenistic and Roman poetry (especially Apollonius Rhodius, Catullus, Lucretius, Virgil, Tibullus, Ovid, Seneca, Lucan, and Statius); Greek epic and tragedy; Roman philosophy; ancient and modern relations between literature and philosophy; gender; theory and practice of literary translation; and the reception of Greco-Roman thought and literature, from Shakespeare and Corneille to Pound and Zukofsky. He is a member of the Poetry and Poetics program.