| Course Description |
This course is conceived as an advanced seminar (i.e., upper-level
undergraduate and graduate) that addresses in more depth the themes of the lecture
course Tragic Bodies (BC 3160). It explores how dramatic enactment represents
boundaries and edges and thus skin, coverings, masking, and dress-up in relation to
gender and sexuality as well as race and class. The skin's tragedy most often is its
vulnerabilities – its othering and debasement, its tendency to be denigrated or willfully
cast off. This course will focus on these bodily edges, surfaces, and coverings, as well as
touching, proximity, and affect in ancient and modern drama as well as in film. In more
depth and more expansively than the lecture course, the seminar treats the three canonical
Greek writers of tragedy (Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides) as unifying threads and
features modern re-envisionings of their dramas that challenge gender, racial, and human
conventions. The course will also feature ground-breaking work on aesthetics, affect and
the senses, materialities, and the post-human in order to craft with the students activist
engagements with embodiment.
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