Sophocles, Oedipus the King

Undergraduate / Graduate

A close literary and philological analysis of one of the most remarkable of all Greek tragedies. This play raises important and perplexing issues of knowledge, responsibility, guilt, freedom, ethics, politics, and suffering, to name only a few. While the poetic text, in its many dimensions, including staging, will offer more than adequate material for classroom analysis and discussion, attention will also be directed to comparing what can be known about other versions of the story and to exploring the reception of this play in later literature and other fields including Freudian psychoanalysis.