Word: kott
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1970-1979
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...KOTT...
Where would Greek drama be without the messenger? The six suicides and one attempted suicide in Sophocles' seven plays are indeed reported rather than witnessed. Yet blood, Jan Kott insists, still happens to be what Greek tragedy is about. Kott, one of postwar Poland's most distinguished critics, now teaches at the State University of New York at Stony Brook. He sights at Greek tragedy, however, along the smoking chimneys of Auschwitz. As he did with his harshly brilliant Shakespeare Our Contemporary, Kott reads his Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides for audiences who "have come to know from their...
...Tyrant. Kott's approach to tragedy is almost too empathetic. He begins and ends with the supreme sufferer, Prometheus. The classic hero, he suggests, enters a world that is either mismanaged or overmanaged. The tyrant may be a king or he may, as happened in the case of Prometheus, be Zeus himself. Out of compassion for the tyrant's suffering victims, out of a superb but frightening presumption, the hero ultimately proposes himself as "mediator and savior." He will rebel. He will disturb the existing order-even risk chaos-to secure a new covenant with power...