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Event Details
Thursday, September 27, 2012, 07:30 pm
Media
The Sopranos: Is There Still Such a Thing as Evil?
Holtzbrinck Lecture
How did the HBO television series The Sopranos deal with morality -- if at all? Since the hero is a mobster, there is plenty of killing, to be sure. But what New Yorker staff writer Joan Acocella finds fascinating "is not the big, lurid crimes," but rather the show's "micro-ethics": how obligations to family versus those to the “organization” play out over time. Acocella considers the extended series – 86 episodes – created as it was by a shifting committee of writers and directors over eight years, and how its structure relates to the classical formulas of tragedy -- and in what ways in commands the moral attention viewers normally give to art.
Moderated by Rebecca Casati, author and journalist, Süddeutsche Zeitung