Please join us for a very special treat! Professor Arnold Weinstein will be giving the following online lecture on Saturday, November 9th at 10 am Japan Standard Time (until 11:15 am). All members are welcome, though advance registration is required (see below). Professor Weinstein will be giving this talk with people in mind who have read Oedipus the King as well as those who have not, as he will be tying the themes of this work to broader contemporary issues that are pertinent to all of us.
Lecture description:
Oedipus the King is the Pandora’s Box for Western civilization. It annihilates a host of certainties we take for granted in its view of knowledge and ignorance, and its ramifications go far beyond 5th century BC Athens. Not only Aristotle but Schiller, Nietzsche, Freud, Lévi-Strauss, Lacan and others have famously grappled with it. This mix of commentators, from Antiquity to the present, tells us that Sophocles’s play is shockingly relevant, not merely to scholars and thinkers, but to all of us.
Given its plot of an all-powerful ruler, a head of state, who is under investigation, and given its backdrop of Plague and mass death, it is eerily relevant to us in 2024, for we too know something about this mix of issues. Above all, it presents us with a tragic view of belated knowing, for it makes us sense the enormity of all that is hidden or dormant in our lives, biding its time. This was true for Sophocles, it is true for us. Yes, the Good Book tells us that ‘a man reaps what he sows,’ but the darker truth here is: all too often we do not know what we have sown until we reap it.
Yet, like prophecy itself, Sophocles’ play is also keyed to futurity. And it thereby enacts one of Literature’s cardinal requirements: to make us feel – now, as we read or see it - the sentient reality and power of its long-ago crises and transgressions.
If you read or reread Sophocles’s Oedipus the King, you will see these matters writ large. But my argument goes well beyond Sophocles and his play, for it seeks to illuminate the universal drama of ‘coming to know’: a drama most of us are obliged to negotiate, in our lives and in our histories, in our personal story and relationships, and in the fate of our country and our planet, right up to the end.
Lecturer Profile:
Arnold Weinstein is the Edna and Richard Salomon Distinguished Professor of Comparative Literature, emeritus, at Brown University. He is the author of 9 books: Vision and Response in Modern Fiction [1974]; Fictions of the Self: 1550-1800 [1981], The Fiction of Relationship [1988]; Nobody’s Home: Speech, Self and Place in American Fiction from Hawthorne to DeLillo [1993]; A Scream Goes Through the House: What Literature Tells Us About Life [2003]; Recovering Your Story: Proust, Joyce, Woolf, Faulkner and Morrison [2006]; Northern Arts: The Breakthrough of Scandinavian Literature and Art from Ibsen to Bergman [2008]; Morning, Noon and Night: Finding the Meaning of Life’s Stages Through Books [2011]; The Lives of Literature: Reading, Teaching, Knowing [2021]. He has received several Fellowships for scholarship from the National Endowment for the Humanities, and several Teaching Awards at Brown University. He has been a visiting professor at the Ecole Normale Supérieure in Paris and a Fulbright professor at Stockholm University, in addition to giving media-based courses on literature at both The Teaching Company and on Coursera.
To register, please click on the following link:
https://keio-univ.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZYvc-mtrj4tEtEess0Jgt2JpYxj3ifuEc4k
Please note that you must have a Zoom account to register for this event. If you do not have one already, kindly download the software for free, establish your account, and then register.