Snowden, Frank M.

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Howard University: Digital Howard

Howard UniversityDigital Howard @ Howard UniversityFaculty Reprints10-1-1945Survey Courses in the Arts and Humanities andWorld LiteratureFrank M. SnowdenFollow this and additional works at: http://dh.howard.edu/reprintsPart of the Arts and Humanities CommonsThis Article is brought to you for free and open access by Digital Howard @ Howard University. It has been accepted for inclusion in Faculty Reprintsby an authorized administrator of Digital Howard @ Howard University. For more information, please contact lopez.matthews@howard.edu.Recommended CitationSnowden, Frank M., "Survey Courses in the Arts and Humanities and World Literature" (1945). Faculty Reprints. Paper 195.http://dh.howard.edu/reprints/195Reprinted from The Classical J ournal, Vol. X L II, No. 4, January, 1947GREEK TRAGEDY IN FRANCE AND AMERICAFran\ M. Snowden, Jr.Howard UniversityIN  his note “ Antigone and French Re- sistance,’’1 Professor Berry calls attention to the role that Anouilh's Antigone played in the French underground resistance during the Nasi occupation of France. In this con­nection, it is interesting to note that another adaptation of a well-known Greek tragic theme has also served a similar purpose. Les M ouches by Jean-Paul Sartre is a reinterpre­tation of the Atreus story. In this recent ver­sion, Orestes resolves to carry out the murder “ not because of any doom on the house of Atreus, not because he must bring about what is already fated, but for the opposite reason, because he must free the house of Atreus and the people of Argos, because the act will be for him as well as others an eman­cipation, a justification by works.“ 2The significance of this recent play in the resistance movement is effectively stated by M r. Bentley as follows: “ The Flies, like Goethe’s Egmont and Schiller’s Wilhelm Tell, is a political drama of resistance to tyranny, of belief in freedom. One can imagine what force some of the lines must have had in oc­cupied France: the arguments for action, for tyrannicide, the recurrence of the word ‘liberte,’ the fascistic ugliness of all the sym­bols of authority, the libertarian audacity of Orestes.’’3Classicists should not overlook the fact that both in France and America thinkers are turning to the ancient Greeks for guidance in understanding today’s problems. In a recent editorial “ Untragic America’’ the editors of Life outline what, in their judgment, America and American drama have to learn from Greek Tragedy.4 This current interest in the Greeks is another challenge to classicists to introduce and to develop courses particularly in transla­tion for the many Americans who may have the desire but not the linguistic ability to understand the Greeks.N otes1 Edmund G. Berry, “ Antigone and French Resist* ance,”  T he C lassical J ournal, 42 (1946), 17 -18 .2 Eric Bentley, The Playwright as Thinker, New York, Reynal and Hitchcock (1946), 242.3 Ibid.4 Life, 21 (1946), no. 23, p. 32. The editorial, however, falls into the common error of considering the idea of progress as something foreign to antiquity: “ This habit is an optimistic faith in progress. Professor J .  B. Bury, who wrote a history of The Idea of Progress, defines it to mean ‘that civilization has moved, is moving and will move in a desirable direction/ This idea is only about as old as modern science, stemming from Bacon and Descartes.”  This statement, of course, overlooks the fact that the very tragedians mentioned in the editorial were all concerned with the idea of progress—  Aeschylus in the Prometheus Bound (436-506); Sophocles in the Antigone (332-364); Euripides in the Suppliants (195-218).

Survey Courses in the Arts and Humanities and World Literature

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Survey Courses in the Arts and Humanities and World Literature

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