Thank you, good morning, everyone.
On April 4th, 1968, Bobby Kennedy was
running for the presidential nomination,
preparing for the primary in Indiana, and
he had a campaign speech scheduled. a
couple of hours before he was supposed
to speak, Martin Luther King was
assassinated, and his aides in the police
were unanimous, Kennedy should cancel the
speech. He overruled them all and went
down to speak. He gave an
extemporaneous speech, and in that speech,
he quoted from memory from one person,
and the person was Aeschylus. That's
somewhat unexpected, I think. Kennedy was
a practicing Catholic, one might have
expected that he would quote from the
Bible. He's also a politician, and if you
look at his other speeches, you might
have thought he would quote from Thomas
Jefferson or Abe Lincoln, but he quoted
from Aeschylus. The answer to this, if you
didn't know it otherwise, you could have
maybe discovered in 2006 when David
Brooks, the columnist for The New York
Times, wrote a column in which he
described how Bobby Kennedy, after the
assassination of his brother John, went
through a terrible period of depression.
He was a small man to begin with, he lost
an enormous amount of weight, people were
very worried about him, and his
turnaround came when he discovered a
book on the ancient Greeks, and
particularly their tragic sense of life.
And in some ways, this story sort of
mirrors my own interest in tragedy, I've
been teaching literature for four
decades, and I've always found a
particular fascination for that type of
literature that we refer to as tragedies.
There's something about the kind of
elusive quality to them, the way they
pierce
the heart and go to the depth of the
soul, that I've always found fascinating.
And so in this course, I get to share
that fascination with other people.
Practically, the course will be a reading
course, so students will read before the
class, in the class there will be some
lecturing, but mostly discussion. And the
text will be, we'll actually start with a
film, a von Sternberg film called The
Blue Angel, and then we'll go to text and
read Sophocles, Oedipus and Antigone,
Shakespeare's Hamlet, and then finish up
with Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman.
We'll also bring into the conversation
three theories of tragedy. So there were
three philosophers who apparently shared
my fascination with tragedy, and
constructed great coherent theories of
tragedy, and what it means, and why it
matters. And those philosophers were
Aristotle, Hegel, and Nietzsche, so I'll be
bringing those to the conversation in
the form of lectures. So the goal of the
course, then, is simply to discuss tragedy
in a way that hopefully helps us share
the kind of wisdom that it contains, and
to do so in a way that, you know, that
doesn't replace the text with analysis,
but uses analysis to enhance our
enjoyment of the text and the way in
which they move us. 
Great, thank you.
Thank you.
