[Lecture Five] Eight Great Plays as Literature and as Philosophy
by Dr. Leonard Peikoff
Total Time: 1 hour, 58 minutes
Course summary: In this course, Dr. Leonard Peikoff selects eight great plays from Western literature to analyze. He examines the literary and philosophic qualities of each play and indicates how the drama concretizes certain ideas from a variety of philosophies. Peikoff masterfully situates each play in its historical period, both from the world events and philosophic context, as he discusses them. Peikoff builds the whole course around a demonstration of how to arrive at objective esthetic judgments about art. Read more »
In this lecture: This lecture is a discussion of An Enemy of the People by Henrik Ibsen.
Q&A Guide
Below is a list of questions from the audience taken from this lecture, along with (approximate) time stamps.
| 1:38:25 | You said that Ibsen’s twelve prose plays made up a cycle. Would you discuss that a little bit? |
| 1:39:46 | Would you like to retell the story about the little girl at Kira’s school who misapplied the theme of this play? |
| 1:43:59 | If I understood you correctly, you said that Ibsen was a conscious advocate of selfishness, but not a philosopher. How was this possible given that the philosophy in the 19th century advocated altruism? |
| 1:45:46 | What can we do to guard against making the errors in thinking that the characters opposing Dr. Stockmann made? |
| 1:49:57 | In light of the establishment of the film industry, how do you see the long-term prospects for stage theater? |
| 1:53:39 | I have in my notes that, in some way, Dr. Stockmann does not have a heroic resonance. Isn’t another way of saying this that he is not a larger-than-life character? Doesn’t that present some sort of a problem in relation to the other plays? It lacks a certain power. |