This course introduces students to the two worlds of Ancient Greek Tragedy: the world in which they were written and performed, and the internal world of the ancient dramas themselves. Tragedy as a concept provides us with a singular means of glimpsing how the Greeks understood the world in which they lived: social and political concepts of justice and injustice, cultural norms of virtue and vice, gender roles and expectations, the relationship of humankind with the divine, and the consequences of our actions in time and space. We will consider the world in which Greek tragedy was written and performed in all of its diversity, and the narrative world within these tragic texts with an eye to how we can use them to reconstruct this ancient worldview of the Greeks. In the process we will apply modern analytical and critical approaches to tragedy like semiotics, narratology, historicism, psychoanalytic criticism, gender theory, and postcolonial approaches to the texts, and contemporary approaches to reconstructing how they were performed. We will also examine the afterlife of these texts as they have been performed and re-interpreted in various contexts and media into the 21st century.