The Christian Humanist Podcast, Episode 12: Tragedy
This week’s music: The Wallflowers’ “6th Avenue Heartache,” from Bringing Down the Horse (1996).
General Introduction
- Stamps, pogs, and other collections
- What’s on the blog this week?
- Response to Sam Mulberry
Introduction to Tragedy
- Will we all be dead in an hour?
- Our fearful, pitiful show
- Euripides, Hippolytus, and the quarrel with the gods
- Senseless tragedy vs. deserved tragedy
Aristotle’s Poetics
- Exclusion of the gods
- The Triangle
- Aristotle’s misreading of Sophocles
- The limits of Aristotle
- Characteristics of the tragic hero
- A tragedy in miniature for the information age
Plato’s Republic
- Why Plato hates poets
- How St. John resolves Plato’s contradictions
- Theory of forms
- The tragicomic irony of Plato’s legacy
The Pardoner’s Tale
- David tells the tale
- The Pardoner’s Tale and the heist movie
Shakespearean Tragedy
- Shakespeare as a student of Seneca
- Departures from Greek tragedy
- What feels modern about Hamlet
- Is Flash Gordon a tragedy?
We Finally Get to Movies
- The Godfather as tragedy of ambiguity (spoiler alert!)
- Yakuza films
- In which we spoil everything but Citizen Kane (you’re welcome, Victoria)
- Another tiresome discussion about the Coen Brothers
- Greek-flavored tragedy movies
- Oceans 13 is a tragedy?!?
Christian Attitudes Toward Tragedy
- Tragedy as precursor to the Gospel
- Flannery O’Connor’s false-bottomed tragedy
- Why Christianity goes beyond tragedy
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Aristotle. Poetics. Trans. Malcolm Heath. New York: Penguin, 1997.
Buechner, Frederick. Telling the Truth: The Gospel as Tragedy, Comedy, and Fairy Tale. New York: HarperOne, 1977.
Chaucer, Geoffrey. The Canterbury Tales. Ed. V.A. Kolve and Glending Olson. New York: Norton, 2005.
Euripides. Heracles. Trans. John Davie. Heracles and Other Plays. New York: Penguin, 2002. 8-46.
—. Hippolytus. Trans. John Davie. Medea and Other Plays. New York: Penguin, 2003. 135-174.
Hemingway, Ernest. A Farewell to Arms. New York: Scribner, 1995.
Plato. The Republic. Trans. Desmond Lee. New York: Penguin, 1987.
Shakespeare, William. Hamlet. Ed. Neil Taylor and Ann Thompson. London: Arden, 2006.
Sophocles. Oedipus the King. Trans. Robert Fagles. The Three Theban Plays. New York: Penguin, 2000. 155-252.
Celebrate faith, learning, and the happy convergences of the two with awesome CHP gear, including (so far!) coffee mugs with the reverend visages of Martin Luther, Desiderius Erasmus, John Calvin, Thomas Aquinas, Elizabeth I, Christopher Marlowe, Francis Bacon, and Søren Kierkegaard.
[...] Show Notes [...]
Love Deadwood!
Awesome series guys!
I had a question about something mentioned toward the end of the comedy episode about most television series being epic. I was wondering if you could go more into detail about that. The reason being I was going to bring up a couple I had thought of–namely, Lost (yeah, I’m one of those guys the Onion warned you about
), mostly just because of the enormous scope of the show.
Also, about No Country For Old Men, I read the book after seeing the movie, and you are spot on about it being just about the closest adaptation of a book to a movie. I can only think of one small scene in the book that was slightly different, and that may just be something I forgot that actually was in the movie. It was astonishingly true to the book.