King Lear - tragedy and beyond

Overview

What you will study

• Participants on this King Lear - tragedy and beyond course offered by University of Cambridge will also see how such a challenge to the idea of tragedy has necessarily involved a wider challenge to fundamental and often cherished ideas, not only about the wider purpose of literature, but likewise about the very nature of good and evil and of humanity's place in the world.

• Particular attention will be given, through collaborative close reading, to the ways the play's text itself initiates such a profound challenge to conventional ideas about tragedy, and to our wider moral bearings in the universe, by the way it represents its characters themselves as grappling with such questions in the face of their often incomprehensible experience.

• Each week will focus on a particular part of the play, as well as on one of the key themes the play holds up for scrutiny and on a corresponding aspect of the critical tradition. The five themes around which the five teaching weeks will be organised are: Justice, Nature, The Gods, Virtue and Vice, and Nothingness.