For this assignment, please read BOTH versions of the play Oedipus the King here:
OedipusLinks to an external site., translated by George Adams
OedpiusLinks to an external site., translated by F Storr
Your goal here is to take notes and notice the differences between the two versions of the same text. What things do you notice that, despite telling roughly the same story, are totally different in the way it is told or how things play out? Pay attention to even slight details here–it is important to see the way the texts are altered and influenced.
For this assignment, I would like you to work with the literary theory New Historicism, or Cultural Studies, as both of these deal very heavily with historical contexts. These schools look to examine where texts come from, what influences their creation, how they are made, who made them, what they wanted to accomplish. In this assignment, it will be important to think about what Sophocles was hoping for with Oedipus in the first place–what is the story he was trying to tell, and why, and how–and then look at these two translations, roughly 100 years apart, and think about the cultural contexts both of these versions are written for, presented to, and again, how and why