UCL FACULTY OF ARTS AND HUMANITIES

1 May 2012

UCL Gustave Tuck Lecture Theatre, Wilkins Building UCL - 6.30pm

Professor Miriam Leonard (Department of Greek and Latin)

After completing her PhD in Classics at Cambridge, Miriam Leonard taught for six years at the University of Bristol. She joined UCL in September 2007. She is author of Athens in Paris: Ancient Greece and the Political in Post-War French Thought (OUP, 2005) her monograph Socrates and the Jews: Hellenism and Hebraism from Moses Mendelssohn to Sigmund Freud is forthcoming from Chicago University Press in 2012.

Tragedy and Modernity

This lecture will explore why Greek tragedy has played such a crucial role in the development of philosophy since the late eighteenth century. Focusing on the works of Hegel, Nietzsche and Freud, the lecture will investigate how the return to antiquity was essential in formulating what we know today as the modern condition. From Hegel’s Antigone to Freud’s Oedipus, the predicament of the tragic protagonist was seen to encapsulate the metaphysical, aesthetic and psychological tensions of modernity.