While you’re all working on your first assignment — which includes a summary of Sophocles’ King Oidipous — you may get a kick out of this peculiar retelling of the story. It’s also a summary of sorts.
Meanwhile, I wanted to direct you to a few posts on Sophocles and Boccaccio from past years. Here’s a sample convener’s post on Oidipous, with a link to an even earlier one. It follows up on something we only brushed against today: the question of why genre matters when we’re comparing the plague descriptions in Sophocles’ drama and Thucydides’ historical account. Here’s another, which may help you start to compare the Sophocles and excerpt from Boccaccio. And here’s an even earlier post on The Decameron which dwells on the relationship between storytelling and plague in Boccaccio’s work. Each of these posts contains ideas I hope we’re able to take up in the next few meetings. Which topics here strike you as most interesting or relevant to our conversations thus far?