Welcome to the Department of Classics!
The Department of Classics invites students to share in the study of the languages, literatures, and cultures of ancient Greece and Rome and the civilizations they helped to shape. We offer several undergraduate majors and minors, including an honors option, and M.A. and Ph.D. degrees. Areas of strength include Greek and Latin literature and social, political, architectural, and intellectual history. Collectively, we emphasize the long and complex story of how diverse communities of the Mediterranean basin, western Eurasia, and beyond have engaged with classical culture and thought from antiquity through the Middle Ages, the early modern period, and up to the present day. Because we are a small and collegial department, students have the opportunity to work closely with distinguished faculty and to develop individualized, and often interdisciplinary, curricular paths fitted to their own interests and experience.
Distinguished Lecture in the Humanities: Bonnie Honig
Lecture by Bonnie Honig (Nancy Duke Lewis Professor, Brown University), entitled “Fatality and Forgiveness in Euripides’ Hippolytus as Noir”
Wednesday, March 27, 3:00-4:30pm, Tutor Campus Center (TCC) 227
Abstract: This lecture revisits JL Austin’s midcentury philosophy of language to consider his idea of “performativity” or “performative utterance” in connection with fatality and forgiveness, central features of Euripides’ Hippolytus, which Austin quotes, in Greek, early in How to Do Things with Words (1955/62). This lecture develops a new reading of the ancient play by reading the Hippolytus as noir: film noir was in its heyday at the time of Austin’s writing and may have influenced classicist Bernard Knox’s influential reading of the play in that same decade (1952). Reading Euripides’ tragedy alongside the 1945 noir film, Leave Her to Heaven (dir. John Stahl), a reception of the Hippolytus, the lecture argues for Phaedra’s fatality as a trait of the sinthomosexual (Lee Edelman) rather than the femme fatale (Mary Ann Doane), and (contra Knox) shows that the forgiveness that passes between Hippolytus and Theseus is less noble than transactional. Austin’s ordinary language philosophy of performativity is reconsidered and repurposed in conversation with democratic theory, feminist theory, queer theory, black studies, and film noir.
Contact Us
Location
The Department of Classics is located in PED 130 on the University Park Campus. Our front door is located on the backside (southeast) of the building, opposite of ADM (Bovard) and Associates Park.
3560 Watt Way, PED 130, Los Angeles, CA 90089-0652