How Greek Tragedy Works

Brian Kulick is chair of the Theatre Program at Columbia University’s School of the Arts. He has been an Associate Artist at The Public Theatre where his work on Shakespeare has been seen at The Delacorte in Central Park, and the Artistic Director of Classic Stage Company where he directed such world premieres as Anne Carson’s critically acclaimed An Oresteia. .

Introduction: 115th and Broadway, circa 410 BCE; PART I: CONVERSING WITH SHADOWS; ON THE INTERPRETATION OF ANCIENT TEXTS; 1. Raising the dead; or, theatre as thanatology; 2. Antigone. A journey to the underworld of the text: how to read a Greek tragedy; 3. Dictionary for the ghost language of the tragic; PART II: TOWARD AN ALTERNATE POETICS; OR, WHAT OUR THREE GREEK TRAGEDIANS CAN TELL US ABOUT THE NATURE AND FUNCTION OF THE TRAGIC; 4. Aeschylus’s Agamemnon; or, first principles; 5. Sophocles’ Electra; or, the dialectics of the tragic; 6. Euripides’ The Bacchae; or, recognition as re-cognition; PART III: FURTHER THOUGHTS ON FORM; 7. Tragedy as "the metaphor of an intellectual intuition;" Hölderlin on the poetics of the tragic; 8. Among the ruins: what the fragments can tell us about Greek tragedy; CODA: BACK TO THE LIGHT OF DAY; Appendices