Sophocles’ Three Theban Plays: Philosophy, Politics and Psychoanalysis

This course will be taught e-learning

GOALS

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This course aims to investigate the three Theban plays (i.e. Oedipus Tyrannus, Oedipus at Colonus, and Antigone) by Sophocles, and the different interpretations that philosophers, psychoanalysts, and literary critics have offered of them. Students will develop adequate critical and analytical skills through the reading of literary works and philosophical and psychoanalytic texts on topics such as death and undeadness, ethics, feminism, funerary rites, kinship, incest, power, sexuality, and violence. Furthermore, students will learn to navigate philosophical and psychoanalytic thinking by addressing the following questions: What can we learn from the three Theban plays? How can we bring philosophy, politics, and psychoanalysis into dialogue?

ProgramME

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CLASS ONE (1 July, 2:00–3:00 PM)

Sophocles: Life and Works

CLASS TWO (3 July, 2:00–4:00 PM)

Oedipus Tyrannus I

• Sophocles, Oedipus Tyrannus, in Sophocles, Ajax. Electra. Oedipus Tyrannus, translated and edited by Hugh Lloyd-Jones (Harvard University Press, 1997), 323–403.

CLASS THREE (5 July, 2:00–4:00 PM)

Oedipus Tyrannus II

• Sophocles, Oedipus Tyrannus, 403–483.

CLASS FOUR (8 July, 2:00–4:00 PM)

Oedipus Complex

• Sigmund Freud, ‘A Special Type of Choice of Object Made by Men (Contributions to the Psychology of Love I)’, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume XI (1910): Five Lectures on Psycho-Analysis, Leonardo da Vinci and Other Works, edited by James Strachey and Anna Freud (Vintage Books, The Hogarth Press, and The Institute of Psychoanalysis, 2001), pp. 163–75.
• Selected parts from Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume IV (1900).

CLASS FIVE (10 July, 2:00–4:00 PM)

Oedipus at Colonus I

• Sophocles, Oedipus at Colonus, in id., Antigone. The Women of Trachis. Philoctetes. Oedipus at Colonus, translated and edited by Hugh Lloyd-Jones (Harvard University Press, 2017), 409–77.

CLASS SIX (12 July, 2:00–4:00 PM)

Oedipus at Colonus II

• Sophocles, Oedipus at Colonus, 478–539.

CLASS SEVEN (15 July, 2:00–4:00 PM)

Oedipus at Colonus III

• Sophocles, Oedipus at Colonus, 540–99.

CLASS EIGHT (17 July, 2:00–4:00 PM)

Antigone I

• Sophocles, Antigone, in id., Antigone. The Women of Trachis. Philoctetes. Oedipus at Colonus, 1–63.

CLASS NINE (22 July, 2:00–4:00 PM)

Antigone II

• Sophocles, Antigone, 63–127.

CLASS TEN (24 July, 2:00–4:00 PM)

Reading the Three Theban Plays I

• Selected parts from Johann Peter Eckermann, Conversations with Goethe: In the Last Years of His Life, translated by Allan Blunden (Penguin Books, 2022).
• Friedrich Hölderlin, Essays and Letters, translated and edited by Jeremy Adler and Charlie Louth (Penguin Books, 2009), 317–32.

CLASS ELEVEN (29 July, 2:00–4:00 PM)

Reading the Three Theban Plays II

• Selected parts from Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, translated by T. M. Knox, 2 vols (Clarendon Press, 2014).
• Martin Heidegger, Introduction to Metaphysics, translated by Gregory Fried and Richard Polt (Yale University Press, 2014), 163–83.

CLASS TWELVE (31 July, 2:00–4:00 PM)

Reading Antigone I

• Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan: Book VII. The Ethics of Psychoanalysis 1959–1960, translated by Dennis Porter, edited by Jacques-Alain Miller (Routledge, 2008), 297–353.

CLASS THIRTEEN (2 August, 2:00–4:00 PM)

Reading Antigone II

• Selected parts from Judith Butler, Antigone’s Claim: Kinship Between Life and Death (Columbia University Press, 2000).
• Selected parts from Alenka Zupančič, Let Them Rot: Antigone’s Parallax (Fordham University Press, 2023).

BIBLIOGRAPHY

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• Kitto, H. D. F., Greek Tragedy: A Literary Study (London; New York, NY: Routledge Classics, 2011).
• Poole, Adrian, Tragedy: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005).
• Sophocles, Oedipus Tyrannus, in Sophocles, Ajax. Electra. Oedipus Tyrannus, translated and edited by Hugh Lloyd-Jones (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997), pp. 323–483.
• Sophocles, Oedipus at Colonus, in Sophocles, Antigone. The Women of Trachis. Philoctetes. Oedipus at Colonus, translated and edited by Hugh Lloyd-Jones (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2017), pp. 409–599.
• Sophocles, Antigone, in Sophocles, Antigone. The Women of Trachis. Philoctetes. Oedipus at Colonus, translated and edited by Hugh Lloyd-Jones (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2017), 1–127.

prerequisites

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The course and readings will be entirely in English. Therefore, an intermediate knowledge of the English language is required.

TEACHERS

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Fabio Tononi is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Centre for the Humanities (CHAM) in the Faculty of Social and Human Sciences (NOVA FCHS) of NOVA University of Lisbon. He teaches philosophy at the Luís Krus Centre – Lifelong Learning in the Faculty of Social and Human Sciences (NOVA FCSH) of NOVA University of Lisbon. Tononi is Principal Investigator (PI) of an exploratory project titled IMCS – Imagination and Memory at the Intersection of Culture and Science (2023–2025), funded by CHAM. He is co-founder and co-editor-in-chief of The Edgar Wind Journal (ISSN 2785-2903), and a steering committee member of the Centre for the Study of Cultural Memory at the Institute of Modern Languages Research, which is part of the University of London’s School of Advanced Study. His research interests include the relationship between art and cognitive neuroscience (specifically as they relate to emotion, empathy, imagination, memory, movement, and the unfinished); the writings of Aby Warburg and Edgar Wind; the essence and tasks of philosophy and science; the interconnection between art and ideology; the concepts of modernism, postmodernism, and hyperculture; Sophocles’ three Theban plays; and poetry. Tononi was the convenor of the Aby Warburg Reading Group and Seminar at the Italian Cultural Institute of London (2020), the Seminar on Freedom and Free Will at the Warburg Institute, School of Advanced Study, University of London (2019–2020), and the Erasmus and Luther on Free Will Seminar at the Warburg Institute (2018–2019). In 2021, Tononi received a PhD from the Warburg Institute. In 2016, he obtained an M.A. in Art History, Curatorship and Renaissance Culture from the Warburg Institute in collaboration with the National Gallery of London. In 2013, he received an M.A. in Art History from the University of Florence. In 2010, he obtained a B.A. in Art History from the University of Parma. Since 2017, Tononi has attended the masterclasses of the Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek at the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities, University of London. He held an internship at Villa I Tatti, the Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies in Florence. During his career, Tononi has co-organised two conferences, chaired twelve panels, and participated in over forty conferences and seminars in highly competitive and international venues. His publications include: Edgar Wind: Art and Embodiment, ed. by Jaynie Anderson, Bernardino Branca and Fabio Tononi, Oxford, Berlin, Bruxelles, Chennai, Lausanne, New York: Peter Lang, 2024, XXIV, 408 Pages, 49 fig. col., 30 fig. b/w.; and “Ernst Gombrich and the Concept of ‘Ill-Defined Area’: Perception and Filling-In”, Journal of Art Historiography, Vol. 29(2), 2023, pp. 1-27.

João Luís Lisboa teaches and researches in the field of cultural history and the history of ideas. He is a researcher at CHAM – Centre for the Humanities (NOVA FCSH and University of the Azores), of which he has been director since 2022. He is a member of the NOVA FCSH Faculty Council elected in 2022. In the History department, he teaches “Methodology of History”. In the Portuguese Studies department, he is responsible for a seminar, “History of the Book” in the M.A. in Text Editing and Publishing. In the Department of Sociology he has collaborated on the seminar “Women and Human Rights”.