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Important Announcement!!!!!!
Reading for Week 9, Fall Quarter:
in our translation, Women at the Thesmophoria is called The Poet
and the Women
Some provocative quotations...
Be not indignant with me, audience, if, though a beggar,
I speak before the Athenians about public affairs in a comedy. Even
comedy is acquainted with justice; and what I have to say will be terrible,
but it will be just.
Aristophanes, Acharnians
Comedy is a representation of people worse than are found
in the world - 'worse' in the sense of uglier, as the ridiculous is a species
of ugliness.
Aristotle, Poetics
It is a very serious thing to be a funny woman.
Frances Miriam Berry Whitcher
Festive folk laughter presents an element of victory not
only over supernatural awe, over the sacred, over death; it also means
the defeat of power, of earthly kings, of the earthly upper classes, of
all that oppresses and restricts.
Mikhail Bahktin
In my opinion, if our state does not come to pierce through
affects to an evaluation of the world it will contract to a lesser psychiatry
and an inexpert one at that. We shall be confined to writing an Oedipus
without the pestilence, an Oedipus whose catastrophe is private and unrelated
to the survival of his people, an Oedipus who cannot tear out his eyes
because there is not standard by which he can judge himself; an Oedipus,
in a word, who on learning of his incestuous marriage, instead of tearing
out his eyes, will merely wipe away his tears, thus to declare his loneliness.
Again, where a drama will not engage its relevancy for the race, it will
halt at pathos, that tempting shield against ultimate dramatic effect,
that counterfeit of meaning.
Arthur Miller, The Theatre Essays of Arthur
Miller
Not only is there no god, but try getting a plumber on
the weekends.
Woody Allen
The basis of Bellow's humor is that the hero is usually
someone who has made a complete mess of his life. This has always
been the comic writer's view of humanity. Tragic heroes complain
only to the gods; the comic ones squabble with their families and dream
of settling scores with their real and imagined enemies.
Charles Simic
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