Tragic Meaning: Daniel Mendelsohn on Euripides

Four one-hour sessions: May 7, 14, 21, and 28. All sessions will start at 7pm EDT. Full members and auditors will have access to recordings of each session that may be viewed after the live sessions conclude.

The most technically innovative and iconoclastic of the three great tragedians, Euripides, considered by Aristotle to be the “most tragic” of them, was famous above all for his penchant for depicting heroines in extremis—so much so that the comic playwright, Aristophanes, wrote a lampoon of the tragedian’s work in which the women of Athens, fed up with being depicted as infanticidal, adulterous, homicidal, and incestuous, plot to assassinate the playwright. In the first three of our plays—Alcestis, Hippolytus, and Medea—we will focus on the representation of femininity in Euripides’ work, focusing on the female characters’ attempts to break out of the social roles that imprison them; while Bacchae, the playwright’s final tragedy, explores gender and sexuality, masculinity and femininity in an astonishingly sophisticated and modern way.

Daniel Mendelsohn, the Editor-at-Large of The New York Review of Books, is an award-winning critic, author, essayist, and translator. His books include An Odyssey: A Father, a Son, and an Epic and three collections of essays and reviews, including Waiting for the Barbarians: Essays from the Classics to Pop Culture and Ecstasy and Terror: From the Greeks to Game of Thrones, both published by New York Review Books. Mr. Mendelsohn is the Charles Ranlet Flint Professor of Humanities at Bard College and the Director of the Robert B. Silvers Foundation, a charitable trust that supports writers of nonfiction, essay, and criticism.

Tragic consciousness—the awareness that human life is bound by inescapable limits beyond our control, and against which we nonetheless struggle as we seek agency and meaning in our lives—has been central to the Western imagination since Homer’s Iliad. In this series of four weekly seminars, the author and classicist Daniel Mendelsohn, the New York Review’s Editor-at-Large, will lead participants through an exploration of “the idea of the tragic” as expressed in the foundational works of European civilization. The first seminar, devoted to the Iliad—the first great expression of a hero’s struggle with the meaning of mortality in the Western tradition—will be followed by sessions on selected works by the three great Athenian dramatists, Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, examining how notions of fate and agency, destiny and history, glory and abjection, evolved along with tragedy during its century-long heyday in Athens.

Event Venue

Online