The Tragic and Comic Poet

English

What power does the poet have to make us cry during tragedies or laugh during comedies? What does the poet understand about the world that we as general audience members don't, or what is the source of the poet's wisdom? This course begins to approach these questions by reading Aristotle's short but profound analysis of the art of the poet called the Poetics. Students then seek to determine the truth of what Aristotle tells us about tragedy and comedy by reading a significant Greek example of each genre. First, as a representative example of tragedy, they encounter Sophocles's Ajax, which dramatizes the fate of the second greatest Achaean warrior in Homer's Iliad. As a representative comedy, students experience Aristophanes's Frogs, the laugh-out-loud story of the journey of the god Dionysius into the underworld to revive Greek tragedy, during the course of which he regulates a debate between two great Greek tragedians, Aeschylus and Euripides. Time permitting, students also examine how Plato's Socrates treats the topics of tragedy and comedy.

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