Choose either A or B below to write a 500-800 word thesis-driven essay.
A) First, use Aristotle’s criteria to explain why Antigone is a tragedy. How does Antigone fulfill Aristotle’s criteria?
Then base the thesis for your essay on the following question: By framing Antigone in Ferguson around the Michael Brown case, Theater of War is claiming racial violence as tragic in the classical sense. Does this framing ring true for our contemporary world?
In the body of your essay, you will want to consider supporting your claim by thinking through the following questions:
Is the Michael Brown case and others like it tragic in the classical sense?
Think about who the characters represent in our modern-day: that is, who is the Creon in the modern sense, the Antigone, the Ismene. the messenger? Is there a Tiresias or a Haemon in our modern conception of this narrative?
Does our modern hero display hamartia and is there catharsis in the way these events play out today?
Is seeing a play like Antigone in Ferguson with its conscious connection to Michael Brown and racial violence a cathartic event? In other words, does the play as a conscious connection to Michael Brown and allow for catharsis?
B) Below is an excerpt from Judith Butlers essay Antigones Claim that deals with the way Butler thinks of Antigone within our contemporary culture:
I have been interested in how certain kind of heterosexual frames and normative gender schemes make certain kind of lives unliveable and ungrievable. That was an important dimension of AIDS activism, and remains one now, especially in light of the sufferings and losses on the African continent: it is very often a struggle to make certain kinds of lost life publicly grievable. The deaths by AIDS were not shameful deaths, but horrible deaths that deserved and deserve a public mourning. In a way, that point brought me to consider Antigone, her insistence on burying her brother even when the open public burial and grieving was against the law. The politics of mourning within war is clearly linked to that question of the distribution and regulation of grievable lives. How do we think about who is grievable and who is not, who is allowed to grieve openly and who is not? And what kind of public speechis needed to call attention to the horrifying way that our capacity to feel horror is differentially distributed and naturalized?
As we titled this conversation Antigones claim, so we may ask what would Antigones claim be for the present and how we understand her claim in the present. It seems to me that in insisting on the public grievability of lives, she becomes for us a war critic who opposes the arbitrary and violent force of sovereignty. In a way, she stands in advance for precarious lives, including new immigrants, the sans-papiers, those who are without health insurance, those who are differentially affected by the global economy, questions of poverty, of illiteracy, religious minorities, and the physically challenged. That she, in some sense, becomes a figure through whom we can think what it means to understand certain lives as more precarious than others, who live out a precariousness so that others can engage in the fantasy of their impermeability and omnipotence.
Base your thesis for this option on the following question: How does Antigone in Ferguson show us about the truth or not of Butlers claims?
In the essay, you should summarize Butler’s ideas about what it means to have grievable and ungrievable lives.
Based on the conscious connection that Theater of War is making between the play and racial violence, who stands in for lives that are grievable? Who stands in as lives that are ungrievable?
In the play, the ungrievable life is Polyneices’. What is the implicit connection is Theater of War making between Polyneices as a war criminal and Michael Brown and so many others as ungrievable lives? What does this connection make you think about in our contemporary culture?
For either choice, you will need to be sure that you explain clearly the connections that you are making between the two plays: Antigone and Antigone in Ferguson. Though they are essentially the same play, one, Antigone in Ferguson, is making a direct claim for the play. As you write, you will need to keep in mind that you are evaluating the plays based on the audience and circumstances for each.
