Wuthering
Expectations

When I read Friedrich Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy Out of the Spirit of Music (1872) several years ago I was interested in it as a 19t...

I will deposit my notes on On Great Writing , which is either a 3rd century text by Longinus, one of the great scholars and rhetoricians of ...

The glory days of book blogs were full of “challenges.”   I hosted several: Scottish literature, Italian, Austrian, Scandinavian, Portuguese...

If only I had another idea as good as reading all the Greek plays in order.  But I do have ideas. 1. Roman plays.   Up to five Roman playw...

I am quoting the end of Alcestis by Euripides, his early whatever it is, not a tragedy, not a satyr play, not a comedy.  Admetos has won ba...

It’s our last plays, the last surviving Greek play, The Girl from Samos (315 BCE) by Menander.  How tastes, or circumstances, had changed i...

This week it’s Menander’s Dyskolos , or The Grouch , or The Misanthrope (316 BCE), which may or may not have inspired the title of Molière’...

We saw Sophocles and Euripides end their long careers with masterpieces, but we do not have that luck with Aristophanes.  Wealth (388 BCE) ...

Aristotle did not invent literary criticism with Poetics (late 4th c. BCE, maybe) – we just read The Frogs – but for centuries it was the ...

The Assemblywomen by Aristophanes – or The Parliament of Women , or several other titles – was performed in 392 BCE, thirteen years after T...

Oedipus at Colonus by Sophocles is one of the plays that got me excited about the entire project of reading or re-reading the complete play...

The Frogs by Aristophanes is this week’s play.  It was performed in what now look like the waning days of Athens, just before their conques...

The final Euripides play is Iphigeneia in Aulis , performed with The Bacchae in 405 BCE.  I normally write “Iphigenia,” but I read the 1978...

Reading Euripides chronologically, it would be fair to think that however ingenious and inventive Euripides was, he did not write a play qui...

I want to invite anyone interested to join me in reading Aristotle’s Poetics , the foundation of Western literary criticism, influential to ...

Philosophy makes me nervous, so I will begin my squib about Plato’s Symposium (c. 385-370 BCE) with an anxiety-deflating observation:  Symp...