In The Eating of the Gods the distinguished Polish critic Jan Kott reexamines Greek tragedy from the modern perspective. As in his earlier acclaimed Shakespeare, Our Contemporary, Kott provides startling insights and intuitive leaps which link our world to that of the ancient Greeks. The title refers to the Bacchae of Euripides, that tragedy of lust, revenge, murder, and "the joy of eating raw flesh" which Kott finds paradigmatic in its violence and bloodshed. Whether reflecting on Prometheus or drawing a modern parallel in Beckett's Happy Days ("the final version of the Prometheus myth"), Kott's vision is brilliant, his method innovative, and his sensibility consistently new. Since this book first appeared, Kott's connections between ancient and modern have become even more compelling in their immediacy.
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“He sights at Greek tragedy…along the smoking chimneys of Auschwitz…No twentieth-century [critic] could come closer to making Sophocles a contemporary.”
— Time
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Jan Kott, (1914–2001) was a Polish American theater critic and an expert on Shakespeare whose theories influenced some of the most innovative of modern theater directors. Born in Warsaw, he studied at the universities of Warsaw, Paris, and Lodz. Kott returned to Poland shortly before World War II and was drafted into the Polish army. Later he took part in the underground resistance against the Nazi occupation. After teaching Polish literary history at the University of Warsaw and being a visiting professor at Yale, Kott lost his Warsaw post on political grounds. He was granted asylum in the United States in 1969, by which time he had become known in Europe for his writings about Shakespeare. He taught courses in drama, English, and literature at the State University of New York at Stony Brook from 1969 to 1983, when he retired.
Stefan Rudnicki first became involved with audiobooks in 1994. Now a Grammy-winning audiobook producer, he has worked on more than five thousand audiobooks as a narrator, writer, producer, or director. He has narrated more than nine hundred audiobooks. A recipient of multiple AudioFile Earphones Awards, he was presented the coveted Audie Award for solo narration in 2005, 2007, and 2014, and was named one of AudioFile’s Golden Voices in 2012.