Meeting Days Monday 7-9:50pm Bayou 2235

Instructor: Craig White   

Dr White's Coursesite

Office: Bayou 2529-8 Office Hours:  4-7 Mondays, 5-7 Tuesdays & by appointment

Phone: 281 283 3380    Email: whitec@uhcl.edu

Instructional Materials

Course Policies

UHCL Writing Center

Model Assignments

This semester's assignments

midterm & research plan (20-30%)
(15-25 February)

research plan and options (15-25 Feb.)
research posts (due 21-26 March & 12-16 April)
research journal or essay (due 12-16 April)

final exam (25-35%)
(3-10 May)

student presentations & participation

discussion leader

video presentation

Bacchae presentation / discussion

Birth of Tragedy presentation / discussion

Tragedies from Classical Greece

Plays & Novels from 20th-Century Africa

Aeschylus, The Oresteia (Agamemnon complete + selections from Libation Bearers & Eumenides) (458 BCE)

Sophocles, Oedipus the King (429 BCE)

Sophocles, Antigone (c. 442 BCE)

Sophocles, Oedipus at Colonus (406, 401 BCE)

Euripides, The Bacchae (405 BCE)

Wole Soyinka, Death & the King’s Horseman (1975) (Norton, 978-0393977615)

Chinua Achebe, Things Fall Apart (1957) (Anchor, 0-585-47454-7)

Buchi Emecheta, The Rape of Shavi (1983)  (George Braziller, 978-0807611180)

Ngugi wa Thiong’o, A Grain of Wheat (1967) (Penguin, 978-0143106760)

Agenda:

syllabus, organization, assignments

presentations (student preferences)

midterm, rationale for course

[break]

next week's assignments

Aristotle's Poetics--spectacle

begin Birth of Tragedy 

Aristotle (384-322 BCE)
(Roman Marble copy of bronze by Lysippus, 4c BCE)

Discussion Questions:

1. What do we already know about classical Greek tragedy (or later tragedy)?

1a. Aristotle? Nietzsche?

2. What do we know (or think we know) about Africa? Colonialis and Postcolonialism?

2a. What knowledge of African literature or authors? 

Preview default discussion questions for every class:

1. How or why is a text classified as a Tragedy or not?

2. Do texts reflect universal or cultural values (i.e., Western Civilization or African? Modern or Traditional?)

3. What aspects of the text elude classification as Tragedy? What other terms or categories are applicable?

4. What is surprising about Tragedy? (As greatest genre, tragedy must evolve)

5. How does Tragedy complicate questions of crime and justice?

6. How may Tragedy and Africa meet?

Agenda: genres + tragic narrative; business, assignments, presentation preferences

history + universality? (intro video)

Classical Greek Poets & Philosophers > Aeschylus (video); Aristotle's Poetics 4c, 13b, 13c, 14c

discussion leader assignment

video: Caryn

[break]

videos: RFK & MLK (l. 212)

Euripides, Bacchae

#5 Apolline / Dionysiac

Oresteia as trilogy (compare O'Neill, Mourning Becomes Electra)

assignments: mask videos

Cassandra

Discussion questions:
Agamemnon  1. Agamemnon starts and builds slowly, but what kinds of audience pleasures may grow with it? How does the play challenge you not only to take some kind of pleasure but also to learn? (literature entertains and informs)

2. Everyone can agree that Agamemnon sacrificing his daughter Iphigenia is horrible, but in the spirit of tragedy, how is it that he's not just a villain or a bad guy as in romance?

3. What dramatic power in Cassandra's appearance & speech at end of Agamemnon?

4. Uses or repression of spectacle?

5. How may Agamemnon or The Oresteia exemplify Nietzsche's Apolline & Dionysiac?

Oresteia as a trilogy:
5. What consequences to learning that every classical Greek tragedy was part of a trilogy? What pleasures or attractions do the 3 plays together offer to an audience? Compare "sequels?"—as in Star Wars, Star Trek, Twilight, Harry Potter. What difference if it's a tragedy-trilogy? How do the second and third plays change the impact of Agamemnon?

6. Libation Bearers: How does Electra model the "Electra Complex" relative to the Oedipal Complex?

7. Euminides: How "tragic" is the ending of The Eumenides & the Oresteia trilogy? Compare to end of comedy in narrative genres. Can it all still be a tragedy if everyone doesn't die at the end?

8. What does the trilogy achieve in terms of civilization? If the Furies or Vengeful Ones are changed into Eumenides or Kindly Ones, what progress has been made?

Agenda: presentations;

introduction to D&KH

discussion questions

tragic narrative + comedy & romance

Trojan Women at Obsidian Theater

Aristotle: mimesis + learning

videos

Nigeria

Wole Soyinka 2015

Discussion Questions for 8 & 15 February: 1. Using Aristotle's Poetics and text-to-text comparison with Oresteia, How may Death and the King's Horseman be a tragedy or not? What advantages and disadvantages to identifying a modern African drama with a Classical Greek tragedy? Consider: family, learning, masks, mixed characters (Jane, Chief's son); spectacle; tragic narrative; setting (market v. palace / urban center)?

1b. Compare to Nietzsche's Birth of Tragedy, esp. Apolline & Dionysiac?

2. How may Death and the King's Horseman be regarded as a postcolonial text? What connections to tragedy?

2a. If Classical Athens stands for the origins of Western democratic city-states (& sites for tragic literature), how may postcolonial Nigeria resemble that status or not?

2b. If postcolonial literature is frequently millennial or apocalyptic, how may Death and the King's Horseman be regarded as millennial or apocalyptic?

default discussion questions: . . .

1. How or why is a text classified as a Tragedy or not?

2. Do texts reflect universal or cultural values (i.e., Western Civilization or African? Modern or Traditional?)

3. What aspects of the text elude classification as Tragedy? What other terms or categories are applicable?

4. What is surprising about Tragedy? (As greatest genre, tragedy must evolve)

5. How does Tragedy complicate questions of crime and justice?

6. How may Tragedy and Africa meet? What do we learn of Africa?

Agenda:

midterm

Trojan Women

Shared & Unique Elements & Themes: Tragedy & Africa

discussion: Jeanette

Bacchae

Agenda: Model Assignments; schedule

NYT article on tragedies; Oresteia & O'Neill's Mourning Becomes Electra

Questions re Obsidian Theater's The Trojan Women by Euripides

Birth of Tragedy: Hanna

Discussion questions

video 

Aristotle, Poetics & Oedipus

Oedipal conflict and Hamlet

Oedipus confronting the Sphinx

Discussion Questions: 1. Oedipus the King is often proclaimed the greatest classical tragedy, but no one considers it friendly or easy to like, and in fact it's rarely performed. What are the obstacles to enjoying this play? What types of pleasure are possible? Why is it so difficult to identify or sympathize with Oedipus as a tragic hero?

2. If Oedipus the King isn't "friendly," the Oedipus Complex is also a challenging subject. Why do literary texts and literary studies keep representing and discussing such a repellent story or subject? How viable (or obsolete) is the Oedipus Conflict for discussing literature, particularly tragedy? How does the concept survive in popular and academic culture, even as an object of satire? Identify impulses to dismiss and ignore it, or grounds for its persistence and validity?

2a. How much may the Oedipal Conflict apply to previous course readings? Aeschylus's Libation Bearers is sometimes cited for the female-correspondent Electra Complex, but more particularly how may the Oedipal Conflict appear in Death and the King's Horseman, esp. the relation of Elesin and Olunde? (though the mother figure is conspicuously absent except perhaps in the figure of Iyaloja, whose own son's marriage plans are disrupted by Elesin's attraction to the son's fiancee).

3. Oedipus as a character is often discussed in terms of fate vs. free will, and the "tragic flaw" or hamartia. How to characterize Oedipus's tragic flaw and how it relates to the mixed characterization of tragedy?

4. How much is spectacle repressed or indulged in the conclusions to Oedipus the King and Hamlet?

5. "Detective stories" remain a popular variation on the romance narrative in which a conflict is introduced or social order is disturbed, evil is projected on a villain, and social order is restored with the villain's punishment. (examples?) In what ways is Oedipus the King like a detective story? In what ways essential to tragedy does it differ?

default discussion questions: . . .  1. How or why is a text classified as a Tragedy or not?

2. Do texts reflect universal or cultural values (i.e., Western Civilization or African? Modern or Traditional?)

3. What aspects of the text elude classification as Tragedy? What other terms or categories are applicable? . . .

5. How does Tragedy complicate questions of crime and justice?

Agenda: midterms, research schedule, presentations

final course text?

Bacchae: Heather

Aristotle's Poetics and Oedipus the King

[break]

discussion: Jeanette

elements or themes of Tragedy

African wrestlers

Discussion Questions: 1. Things Fall Apart is taught in high schools and colleges across the United States. If someone has read only one novel written by an African, that novel is usually Things Fall Apart. How many of you read it before? For which courses, with what lessons, themes, emphases?

1a. Why or how does this novel succeed for so many diverse readers? If your answer is "universal," what are the attractions and dangers of "universal themes?" How can the dialogue or dialogic process manage those conflicts?

1b. How may the Oedipal Complex appear in Things Fall Apart, particularly in the relationship of Okonkwo and his son Nwoye? Is the Oedipal Complex unique to the western culture of modernization, or common to the west and Africa?

2. What about African people qualifies as “traditional?" What attractions and risks to tradition? e.g. What ranges to women's status in traditional societies? Traditional culture as gendered culture? 13, 23, 64, 109-10

Added observation and question: In the second half of Things Fall Apart, the novel's narrative pace and the immediacy or intensity of the reader's involvement seems to slacken, so that in past seminars students often concentrate on the opening third and the final chapter (Okonkwo's suicide) while largely ignoring the bulk of the novel’s second half (, and I myself don’t remember those parts nearly as well. Could our attention be more focused on the violence that punctuates the plot? (While we're at it, how do Achebe's representations of violence fit with tragedy's management of spectacle?)

Added question: How may Okonkwo fulfill the characterization of a tragic hero with a tragic flaw, as described by Aristotle or represented in our other texts? (e.g., Agamemnon, Clytaemnestra, Pilkings, Elesin, Oedipus, Pentheus)

default discussion questions for every class:

1. How or why is a text classified as a Tragedy or not?

2. Do texts reflect universal or cultural values (i.e., Western Civilization or African? Modern or Traditional?)

3. What aspects of the text elude classification as Tragedy? What other terms or categories are applicable? . . .

5. How does Tragedy complicate questions of crime and justice?

6. How may Tragedy and Africa meet?

Agenda: schedule, assignments, question re final text

Bacchae part 4

Birth of Tragedy: Caryn

[break]

Things discussion: Heather

Objective 1 caveat; universal humanism & cultural-historical respect 

Agenda:

assignments, research schedule, final text

discussion and video: Niki

[break]

Bacchae: Hanna

Birth of Tragedy 

Greek poets & philosophers

Liebestod from Wagner's Tristan & Isolde

Liebestod (love-death) from Wagner's Tristan & Isolde

Antigone captured performing Polynices's burial rites

Discussion Questions: 1. A generation ago, Oedipus the King was the standard "classical tragedy" read in secondary schools. Today the tragedy of choice is Antigone, which is more popular to teach as classical tragedy in schools today—why? What are its appeals compared to Oedipus the King? How does Antigone feel more popular and appear more modern? (tragedy modernizes)

Consider Romance elements, such as Antigone as oppressed underdog, Creon as patriarchal villain, suicide as transcendence. Compare Antigone to Romeo & Juliet as "romantic tragedy" or "tragic romance."

Antigone is the first-written of Sophocles's Theban plays. How does the conclusion seem like a young writer's? e.g., melodramatic or "over-the-top" end to Antigone & Haemon? Too obvious and sweeping a change for Creon?

2. Only men wrote Greek tragedies, but women often appear as central characters. What conflicts or responsibilities do women represent that make their lives appropriate subjects for tragedy? In Antigone, for instance, how does the title character's acting out expose larger problems in Thebes and its leadership?

3. Who is the play's tragic hero? Antigone or Creon? How much does Creon's tragic flaw appear as a crisis of masculinity? Compare Creon to Okonkwo or Pilkings as tragic hero. How much may the tragic flaw be described as a simple failure of humanity?

4. How comical (or potentially comic) are the Guard's repeated appearances? ll. 256 ff., 366, 385, 432-450 

Agenda: research, assignments, additional questions re Shavi?

presentations?

discussion: Hanna

[break]

Birth of Tragedy: Jeanette

instructor presentation  

Buchi Emecheta
(b. 1944, Nigeria)

Discussion Questions: 1. Rape of Shavi can be identified with a number of genres: science fiction, utopian fiction, allegory, melodrama, and more. How may its narrative be classified as a tragedy or not? How much does the presence of other genres support or conflict with a reading of the Shavi as Tragedy?

2. Dramatic tragedies often feature women in central roles but are written almost exclusively by men. Tragic narratives do appear in women's fiction—e.g. Toni Morrison, George Eliot, Emily Bronte. How does woman's authorship inflect tragic narrative and characterization in these and other texts but especially Rape of Shavi?

3. How may The Rape of Shavi exemplify post-colonial fiction, particularly in its moral and political characterizations of the colonizers and colonized? How do the two cultures exemplify modern and traditional ways? May the shift from tradition to modernity be associated with the appearance of tragedy in emergent empires or nations?

4. How may Patayon, Shoshovi, and Asogba exemplify the Oedipal Complex? How may the Oedipal Conflict mediate the shift from tradition to modernity?

5. Who are potential tragic heroes of the novel, with what tragic flaws? Consider Asogba, Flip? May the novel's discussions whether the "other" is human be associated with the tragic flaw?

6. Evaluate Emecheta's style. How much does it resemble Achebe's in its apparent naivete or flat affect? How much may this apparent naivete or artlessness be an artful stratagem?

Default questions: Do texts reflect universal or cultural values (i.e., Western Civilization or African? Modern or Traditional?) What aspects of the text elude classification as Tragedy? What other terms or categories are applicable? How does Tragedy complicate questions of crime and justice? How may Tragedy and Africa meet?

Agenda: 7xThebes (greaves, sacrifice); Looking at Antigone review

Birth of Tragedy: Heather

Bacchae: Caryn

Shavi discussion

Agenda: research schedule, preview final exam next class

discuss Oedipus at Colonus

Gospel at Colonus: Heather

assignments

Oedipus@Colonus w/ Ismene

Discussion Questions:

Oedipus at Colonus: The Furies are back! (These spirits of revenge pursued Orestes in the Oresteia. Here, the grove where Oedipus & Antigone rest is sacred to Furies, who would naturally be scandalized by Oedipus's crimes.)

1. Compare the chorus's and audience's potential catharsis of "pity and fear" for Oedipus to our reactions to the same character in Oedipus the King. Since modern audiences typically have difficulty identifying with Oedipus as King, how may our attitudes to him change in this play?

2. Oedipus acts helpless, but how helpless is he really, and how much is he controlling the action? How convincing are his speeches justifying his past sins? Evidence of tragic flaw?

2a. Continuing #2, what about Oedipus's character is revealed by his cursing of Polyneices? Why is the scene so powerful and meaningful? Compare to Bible's parable of the Prodigal Son? (Potential contrast of Abrahamic and Classical Greek-Roman ethics)

2b. Since Antigone is Oedipus's true child, compare her character in Oedipus at Colonus to her character in Antigone.

3. How does Oedipus's death resemble the conclusion of a romance as transcendence? (narrative genres)

3a. Compare conclusion to conclusion of the Oresteia trilogy in The Eumenides?

4. Discuss spectacle in Oedipus at Colonus's finale or elsewhere in play? What advantages to showing or not showing rescues, divine actions, etc.?

5. Not to press comparisons to diminishing returns, but how might Oedipus's resolution appear Christ-like or compatible with the Christ story? (This potential analogy is partly encouraged by the translator's use of biblical language.)

6. Formal question: How do the rhymes and meters of the century-old translation of Oedipus at Colonus affect our reading of the play and our potential sense of its presentation (as poetry, song, dance) to an ancient Greek audience?

Agenda: final exam preview

2016 < 1916 the Easter Rising, Ireland; Yeats, "Easter 1916"

review Oedipus at Colonus: instructor

Bacchae: Hanna

[break]

begin Grain of Wheat

Derek Walcott, "A Far Cry from Africa" 

Naipaul, Bend in River

default discussion questions: 1. How or why may this text be classified as a Tragedy or not?

2. Do tragedies reflect universal or cultural values? (i.e., Western Civilization or African? Modern or Traditional?)

3. What aspects of the text elude classification as Tragedy? What other terms or categories are applicable?

4. How does Tragedy complicate questions of crime and justice? (moral distribution)

5. How may Tragedy and Africa meet?

Discussion Questions: 6. What is the status of women in tragedy and Africa? May "mythic" representations of womanhood as "mother earth" or "Mother Africa" be both elevating and patronizing? (cf. Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness, 2.50-51). Mumbi.

7. Compare the Rung'ei Market to the market in Death and the King's Horseman, the Greek theater and its settings for tragedy settings, the agora of Greek public life, and the field and stage for the Uhuru celebrations. (New York Review of Books) How may "staging" affect the content or effect of a tragedy?—that is, do tragedies require a central stage or ground where all characters may meet, where the domains of public and private also converge, and where spectacle may be expressed or repressed?   

8. Discussion of question #1 above sometimes mentioned that a text "feels like a tragedy," sometimes specified as an ominous tone or atmosphere and a sense of inevitable doom plus or minus suspense. How may this atmosphere, tone, or tension be present in Grain of Wheat?

8a. How may the quality of characterization in Grain of Wheat immediately strike a reader as tragic? 

9. How may the conclusion of Grain of Wheat and our other tragic texts represent irony, and how may irony, which is popularly associated with diminution or cynicism, be associated with the greatness of tragedy?

Agenda: final exam

Gospel at Colonus: Heather

[break + evaluations]

discuss Grain of Wheat