#  Family Drama: Crime, Destiny, and Tragic Kinship 

 





 Semester:   Summer 

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 Year offered:  2024 

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 Link: [Course Website](https://courses.dce.harvard.edu/?details&srcdb=202403&crn=35699) 

 

 

 

 They mess you up, your mom and dad. This sentiment, paraphrased from the English poet Philip Larkin, has inspired some of the most profound art in human history. Family can be a safe space: it is a source of profound love, immense sacrifice, and courageous solidarity. But family may also threaten grave dangers: old resentments blossom, new disputes loom, and the weight of ancient wrongs is never fully relieved. In this interdisciplinary course, we explore the transgressive acts committed in the name of family—for love, for rage, for vengeance—as well as the artistic dialogues surrounding them through the ages. This journey begins with some of the most notoriously dysfunctional families ever depicted—those of Heracles, Medea, Oedipus, and Agamemnon in the tragic dramas of ancient Greece. Devoting particular attention to the theatrical construction of gender in family relationships, we consider how Athenian drama figured in the societal controversies of its time and why it continues to be relevant today. With these dramatic works as our template, we move to their contemporary analogue in *The Godfather* cinematic trilogy, in which notions of family honor spur shocking acts of violence. Throughout the course, we have frequent opportunity to consider why visions of fate, criminal wrongdoing, and inherited guilt continue to haunt popular depictions of family even today.