final exam assignment

LITR 4533 TRAGEDY  Final Exam Samples 2010 Essays & Excerpts on Part A: Overall Learning Experience

Instructor's note: by a graduate student teaching primarily American literature in area high school

Danielle Maldonado 

The Learning Experience of an Educator:
Teaching Genre and Tragedy to High School Students

Upon signing up for the course, I wasn’t enthusiastic about reading tragedy. I teach American Literature and have an interest in more modern works. As an educator, I should probably appreciate and value all genres and works but Greek tragedy had never been my favorite. With the antiquated language, the introduction of the supernatural battling the natural and the idea that the tragedy mainly befell nobles, I was less inclined to read classical Greek tragedy because I simply couldn’t relate.

I must admit that even as an educator, I was unaware of Aristotle’s Poetics and thought tragedy was merely a disastrous and unfortunate turn of events that led to the downfall of the archetype of the tragic hero with his tragic flaw. I had taken a Shakespeare course as an undergraduate and thought I understood Elizabethan tragedy but we never touched on genre or what defined these plays as tragedies. An even within the Elizabethan tragedies, genres became so melded that I felt it was impossible to define them, aside from the fact that a professor told me they were tragedies.

It was not until I applied the definition of the tragedy to modern literature that I came into some understanding and appreciation for the genre. In fact, I realized that any genre, however obsolete I may feel the works within it are, could be applied, characteristically, to more modern literature. I began to compare what I was reading and the characteristics of tragedy, comedy, romance and satire to the stories, novels and plays that I teach, seeing a parallel. It was not until this course and the research I conducted that I understood that there is no pure genre and nearly all contain a taste of another. It was also not until I completed the course that I understood why students were reluctant to read older works like Greek tragedy – for the same reasons I was.

That being said, I would like to discuss what I took from this course and how I plan to apply the idea of genres, with a focus on tragedy, to my American and British Literature courses next school year. The idea that the four basic narrative genres could be applied to modern art appealed to me and I had the idea to use that to teach the genres that are represented next year. In order to most efficiently do this, I am comparing a course text to a text that is a part of the high school curriculum and offering a modern film or clip that could be accompanied to help students understand the concept of the genre. I don’t intend to teach genre in a bubble just because it was a focus of this course. Rather, through this course, I learned the characteristics of each genre through Northrop Frye’s idea of the four basic story lines. While students should learn the basics of at least the four narrative genres discussed in the course, it isn’t so much the characteristics that are important to a college-bound high school student. As I learned in the course, it is more importantly the conventions of these genres that students should become familiar with so they can distinguish the overlap in each.

Comparing more contemporary novels and works within the high school curriculum to the classical Greek tragedy of Sophocles, Aeschylus and Euripides as well as other plays studied within the course would offer students a better understanding of ancient Greek texts with more modern language, circumstances and an update to the definition of tragedy. In addition, supplementing with a contemporary film clip could help students to both understand and define each genre and recognize its updates.

Though satire wasn’t a genre the course put much emphasis on, it’s still important for high school students to study it because it’s so pervasive in the media today. According to Frye, a satirical story line “tends to be extremely episodic and opportunistic.” One of the more popular aspects of satire is that it often plays on our prior knowledge of current events and pop culture, which tends to be a double-edged sword since current events and pop culture are quickly dated. Reading Sophocles’ Antigone, a student might extrapolate some aspects of satire, particularly how Antigone, a woman, was willing to meet her own demise for the honor of her brother, a man. However, because Antigone is an ancient Greek text, it is unlikely that it was intended to be read that way. One piece of literature that is a part of the high school curriculum is Jonathan Swift’s A Modest Proposal. In this essay, Swift suggests that poor Irish families should turn to selling their children as food to the upper class in difficult economic times. In this, Swift was poking fun at the British government and their plans to ease economic crisis. Many students who read this satire at the high school level don’t, at first, understand that Swift is merely trying to make a point and not encouraging cannibalism. Studying the genre first would ease this problem and could also help them to understand wildly popular modern media versions of satire. For example, The Onion online newspaper is satirical in nature and reports on current “news.” In this video clip, (found here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IKkUzMiWpd0) The Onion promises to report the news from the year 2137 before it happens. This mocks current national and local news stations that claim to know and report the breaking news first. Another popular television show, Family Guy, uses satire in this clip (found here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IseGrAPTevU&feature=PlayList&p=B80271F2E85D6310&playnext_from=PL&playnext=1&index=7) to draw on our prior knowledge of the movie, Office Space.

          Comedy is seen in the course through Peter and Simeon in Desire Under the Elms. The comedic team, who are fans of spectacle, are searching for a new identity – one that comes with money panning gold in California. Their problem with their father and the farm is overcome by selling their portions of the farm to Eben and boarding a ship to California. Aristotle said that comedy is “an imitation of characters of a lower type,” which this team seems to be. They also possess a defect that is their drinking and dislike of their father. On comedic team within the high school curriculum is Lennie and George in Of Mice and Men. Lennie’s defect, though he’s a large man, is his limited mental capacity while his partner, George, is small and intelligent. The two opposites travel trying to find work. The misunderstandings and bickering of the two opposites can be taught as comedy. While the situations Lennie gets into are serious and ultimately he ends in tragedy, it is the opposite duo that can be seen as comedic. This can also be said of Todd and Barry’s characters in High Fidelity. These two coworkers are opposites who are forced to work together and often spend time together. Seen in this clip (found here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yVv5sIY57TA) they argue about what type of music to play in the store. Jack Black’s character, in particular, illustrates the lower comedy as a more physical type of humor. Another scene in the same movie illustrates comedy. Seen in this clip (found here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=68epYBCtFWI&feature=related) Rob Gordon is confronted by his ex-girlfriend’s new love interest. Several scenarios play out, all of which are physical (lower) comedy.

          According to the course, romance begins with a separation of characters, leads to a journey and ends in transcendence. Many of the tragedies we covered in the course were interwoven with elements of romance. From Samson Agonistes to Desire Under the Elms, we see romantic is prevalent within tragedy, particularly the finales of each play which end tragic, but leave with the characters rising above their situation. In Samson Agonistes, though Samson dies, he willingly redeems himself by tearing the pillars of the Philistine temple down killing many enemies of the Jews. In Desire Under the Elms, Eben and Abbie are hauled off to jail for the murder of their child, still professing their love and adoration for one another, hoping they’ll remain together forever. Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun is one example of romance within the high school curriculum. The play begins with a journey for each character – how to achieve their ultimate dream. Though the Younger family stumbles upon several bumps in the road, including blatant bigotry, they ultimately transcend their problems and move into an all-white neighborhood anyway. There are many romances in modern film but one film clip I found stood out to me. The trailer for Paper Heart, (found here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zZbqQ-aeXO0) a fictional documentary about a young woman who doesn’t understand love and ultimately finds it while on her quest to understand it, is an excellent example. This transcendence of her problem at the end is what creates, according to Frye, the perfect romance.

Though many of the plays and novels discussed within the other genres fit there, they also all fit into the genre of tragedy, the course’s prime objective. This genre was obviously seen in every text we read, though each seemed to have at least a sprinkling of one of the other four narrative genres that Frye discusses. One text that I’d like to examine more closely is O’Neill’s Desire Under the Elms. In Aristotle’s Poetics, (in short, since it was discussed in length during both the course and in my midterm) he asserts that tragedy is a higher-order genre that uses mimesis and avoids spectacle. The hero within the tragedy should be a noble character that isn’t inherently good or bad “whose misfortune is brought about not by vice or depravity, but by some error or frailty.” Despite this definition, there is one idea that we, as scholars of literature, cannot deny and that is that everything changes. The more modern the tragedy is, the further away from Aristotle’s ideas on the genre we get. Some aspects are altered from classical Greek tragedy. As readers, we must acknowledge the slight modernization of genres so long as they’re thoroughly examined and can still be used a tool for classification with roots in Aristotle’s studies.

It should first be noted in this tragedy that the situations that occur within tragedy are a representation of real life, as is the romance between Abbie and Eben. Within their romance, a hint of the Oedipal complex exists. It is the “arrangement of incidents” between Ephraim and characters so remote as even Eben’s mother that helped facilitate the unnatural relationship between Abbie and Eben. No character is either good or bad throughout the play. In fact, we often pity each character for one reason or another and it’s difficult to like any one more than the other.  Though there are instances of spectacle within the play, such as the dance scene, the play represses it within the death scene. Abbie murders she and Eben’s child without fanfare or much of a ruckus. In fact, as it’s occurring, it’s only marginally mentioned in the stage direction. One aspect of the modernization of this play is that no characters are noble or Kings. Rather, they’re all working-class New Englanders who’ve struggled at one point or another.

I would pair this play up with Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby from the high school curriculum. In an effort to be brief, please consult my Teaching the Modern Tragedy to High School Students midterm for examples of how this work fits the genre of tragedy. Finally, a film clip that would best illustrate the conventions of tragedy is Baz Luhrmann’s 1996 version of Romeo + Juliet, (found here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fsUod5OnV30) though in this version spectacle is also less repressed. The archetype of tragedy, this scene shows what amounts to the suicide and tragic ending to each character. 

You could even use music to teach the genre. For example, Johnny Cash’s The Long Black Veil could be used as a model to discuss tragedy and write creative pieces at the high school level. In the song, the singer/narrator is blamed for a murder in the town. When the judge asks for his alibi, he can’t give it because he was “in the arms of his best friend’s wife.” The song represents tragedy in a number of ways. First, our tragic hero got mixed up into a problem in the town. Though he didn’t commit the murder, “the man who ran looked a lot like [him].” But the singer/narrator is so gallant that he refuses to give him alibi, rather accepting the consequences for a murder in order to “regain moral control of the situation.” Second, both instances of spectacle are repressed – during the murder at the beginning of the song and the singer/narrator’s hanging. Both are only briefly mentioned, his death only hinted at with the phrase “the scaffold is high.” The song ends with a touch of romance, mentioning how “sometimes at night, when the cold wind moans, in a long black veil, she cries over my bones.”

There is something to be said for the modernization and flexibility of tragedy when it comes to teaching. Speaking about plot in Euripides’ Hippolytus, in 2008, Jennifer Clary mentioned how Aphrodite wasn’t present in Racine’s Phaedra and how – in the even more updated version of the play, “without the use of spectacle and the sublime Desire Under the Elms would be nothing more than a boring story of an old man who re-marries.” If I were to take one thing from the course, it would be that flexibility within tragedy and other genres is necessary. Since there are no pure genres, the modernization shouldn’t have a grand effect on the premise of learning them anyway. I think it’s necessary that high school students can compare more classical texts with what’s forced upon them (the high school literary canon) and modern film that may pique their interest more than just classical texts; if, for nothing else, exposure.