Professor Glenn Most Delivered a Guest Lecture, "Suspense and Surprise in Greek Tragedy" on May 16.
May 16, 2025
The Department of Classics and the Classics Graduate Cluster were delighted to welcome Professor Glenn Most (University of Chicago) to deliver a guest lecture, titled "Suspense and Surprise in Greek Tragedy," on Friday, May 16. The abstract for the talk can be found below:
Starting from Alfred Hitchcock's classic distinction between suspense and surprise, I ask how much of each we find in Greek tragedy. Given that the tragic plots were generally well known, we might expect to find very little of either. And yet the surviving tragedies show that there was much of both. What forms these assumed, and how they were managed, reveals much about the ancient tragedians and their relations to their audiences. I conclude with some considerations about differences between ancient and modern literature in this regard.