- P&P
- Let's continue with Oedipus today and then review some of the highlights from Leithart.
Highlights and questions from Heroes
- What is one of the major ways that Oedipus has affected modern society, modern thought? Freud!
- "Oedipus embarks on a time-reversing quest that returns him to the womb--of his wife."
- Oedipus Tyrannus operates on a political level
- Tyrannus, though it means king, could mean tyrant, or could at least refer to a benevolent king with absolute power.
- Several cultural oppositions serve to inform the work
- City and wilderness
- Civilization and savagery
- Oedipus is a study of what happens when a godlike hero comes to a city - he destroys it
- Oedipus is a dramatic rendering of the Greek religious rite of the pharmakos
- The imagery of the play associates Oedipus with the cultural and scientific achievements of ancient Athens, yet Sophocles reverses these things:
- Hunter hunts himself
- Ship's captain loses control of the ship
- Physician is sick and infects everyone
- Plowman plows in a field he ought not and causes sterility
- The theological dimension: While "man is the measure of all things," Oedipus learns that "man is measured by the gods."
- Man tries to measure the gods' prophecies
- Unfortunately, he mis-measures ; )
- Prophecy proves reliable
- Some Greek dramatic terms (Heroes bottom of 312-313):
- Hamartia - a tragic fault, a mistake, a false judgment, an error
- Hubris - pride that seeks to exceed human limits
- The pursuit of knowledge becomes a sort of incest, a transgressing of unnatural boundaries:
- Oedipus' self-knowledge does not set him free: it indicts him
- His knowledge affirms he is incestuous: his relationship undermines the fundamental structure of the life of the city, of the polis.
HW: Snag a copy of Leithart's Brightest Heaven of Invention.
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