CLASS 1551

FWS: Creativity and Crisis

Course Description

Course information provided by the Courses of Study 2024-2025.

In the Poetics, Aristotle asserts the most successful Greek tragedies elicited from their audiences both pity and fear, a two-fold experience of emotional release called "catharsis." Taking the philosopher's claim as a point of departure, this course explores how artistic practices comprised creative responses to disaster in the pre-modern Mediterranean. Reading and writing assignments address the restorative capabilities of a range of media, with an emphasis on the visual and performing arts. Acts of making, or even the destruction of artworks, facilitated psychological reactions to traumatic events, the civic commemoration of collective loss, and negotiations of private subjectivity in mourning. Such critical awareness of the emotional aesthetics of style, form, and content will inform the craft of our authorial voices.

When Offered Fall.

Satisfies Requirement First-Year Writing Seminar.

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