Adrian Holden

New and Exciting Ways of Thinking about Tragedy

            When I first came to this class, I felt that I had some working knowledge of tragedy, and to be fair I did.  As a life-long student and future teacher of literature, I thought that I could sit down in any high school classroom and do a thorough job when it came to discussing/teaching the genre of tragedy.  After taking this course, however, I am happy to report how wrong I was.  While it is wholly possible that I would do a fair job of introducing tragedy to students who have never been exposed, to actually teach tragedy requires much more than what I had coming into this class.  What I had in my head were rules for tragedy, not conventions – rigid guidelines that included the basic tragic hero/tragic flaw, “everybody dies“ approach to tragedy.  Admittedly, it is true that most tragedies generally include a tragic hero who is a great man with some sort of tragic flaw, but there is so much more to be discovered and examined when teaching this genre.  Some of these things include spectacle and the sublime, tragedy’s cultural and historical backgrounds, classical tragedies and their updates, and why plot is the soul of tragedy, among others.   The purpose of this essay is to reflect on my status as a student and a potential teacher of tragedy and to explore some of the texts and concepts that I have discovered during this semester and would like to share with future students.

            An interesting question posed by this topic concerns what we did not cover in the class and that is where I would like to start.  When I signed up for this class, I was completely ready to disseminate all the knowledge that I had to the class regarding the tragic hero and tragic flaw.  I was quite surprised to discover that these were only brought up in passing and were never really investigated by the professor.  One reason this may be a stock topic in high school literature courses may be, as the question suggests, because it is a topic that is easy to test.  Characters can be easy to identify with.  A teacher may even stir up lively debate when discussing whether pride or ambition was Julius Caesar’s tragic flaw.  However, if this is where the teacher spends most of their lecture time, then he/she is not doing tragedy justice.   As, Aristotle contends, “plot…is the soul of tragedy; character holds the second place,” (Poetics handout).   So I feel that, as a teacher, I would better serve the students by featuring tragedy’s multilayered plot mechanisms. 

            Another facet of tragedy learned from this course that I feel would translate well into the classroom is that of the family dynamic involved in tragedy.  From Agamemnon to Hamlet to Desire Under the Elms, the genre is rife with families in tragedy.  As more and more children today face the reality of broken homes and hosts of other problems, I believe that they could and would relate to some of the familial issues raised by tragedy.  I definitely believe that one could successfully teach Oedipus Rex, Phaedra, and Mourning Becomes Electra in a high school class as the students will find a way to identify these characters and their situations.   

            Not to completely discount the entirety of training that I have received in the past, but this course has opened up new and exciting ways of thinking regarding tragedy that I simply did not have before.