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Sunday, June 2, 2019 to Friday, June 7, 2019
Columbia College Morningside Campus
1130 Amsterdam Ave
New York, NY 10027
This event has passed. See the Events Calendar for upcoming events.

Core | Reexplore is a one-week holistic learning experience that includes extensive seminar-style class time, as well as select excursions that explore art and theater related to the theme. Alumni participants will engage in social gatherings that encourage conversation, friendship and community, reflective of the characteristics of the Core Curriculum experience.

Core | Reexplore will take place on the Morningside campus and feature outings throughout New York City during the week.

This Year’s Theme: Tragedy

Tragic drama has often been thought to portray the central conflicts and mysteries of human experience more profoundly than any other literary form.

Core | Reexplore will explore the nature of tragedy by focusing on six plays composed across 25 centuries: Sophocles’s Oedipus Rex and Antigone; Euripides’s The Bacchae; Shakespeare’s King Lear; Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler; and Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman. We’ll look closely at the intricate construction of speech and action in this great variety of tragic form, and consider the social, political and cultural contexts in which tragic drama arises. We will also examine the complex relationship between tragedy and philosophy, including Plato’s plan to exclude tragic poets from the ideal republic, Aristotle’s account of the nature and value of tragedy, Nietzsche’s celebration of tragedy’s Dionysian element, and Camus’ reflections on whether tragedy has a future.

The class will be co-led by Columbia faculty and invites additional guest faculty throughout the week.

Our faculty co-leads are:

James Adams, Professor of English and Comparative Literature

Michele Moody-Adams, Joseph Straus Professor of Political Philosophy and Legal Theory