LITR 4533 TRAGEDY Midterm Samples 2010 Essay Answers to Topic 2

2. Write an opening draft of Part A (overall learning experience) on final exam (3-4 paragraphs, 1.5-2 double-spaced page equivalent)

Haylie Unger (grad student)

Part 2 of Midterm: Overall learning experience-tragedy

“The Greatest Among These Is: Tragedy”

          Throughout my undergrad experience, I studied a number of tragedies, including Antigone, Medea, Hamlet, King Lear, and Oedipus Rex, along with a few other lesser-known works. However, other than ‘hubris,’ I had little knowledge of the conventions of tragedy. Furthermore, I did not understand why tragedy was so praised in most of my classes as the “greatest of all the genres.” Often I wondered, “Where are all the stories with the happy endings?” Still, I found myself drawn to these strange tales of families gone awry and seemingly unsolvable problems. Now, I understand.

          Tragedy is not the greatest genre merely because it is difficult to analyze, as I once suspected. Tragedy’s greatness lies in the fact that it offers material to be analyzed. Rather than tickling the insatiable human appetite for happy endings and impeccable heroes, as other genres do, tragedy forces the mind to grapple with ethics, social agendas, and the complexities of characters battling innate flaws common to all humanity (White, “Tragedy” 2). According to Aristotle, “tragedy is an imitation of an action that is serious, complete, and of a certain magnitude…” which leads to a catharsis of emotions (qtd. in White, “Aristotle’s” VI). Thus, it provides so much more food for mental contemplation. Rather than relying on spectacle, as some tragedies of a lower nature, horror, action, or other genres, higher tragedy represses events that tend to shock audiences with their graphicness, and instead work to produce the sublime by cultivating fear and pity in viewers (White, “Aristotle’s” VI).

          If all literature is a form of mimesis in that it imitates human nature, then tragedy is doubly that. Tragic heroes are a blend of the brutality and beauty of human nature, not only accurately depicting human nature, but also making it possible for tragedies to present complex social or psychological problems which are often considered “taboo topics” (White, “Tragedy” 2). Although viewers may be shaken by tragedy’s depiction of disorder among family members, one finds that it is the very expected closeness of characters in tragedy that in effect causes the ultimate reaction of pity and fear so important to the purpose of tragedy. For example, without the familial bonds (and moral expectations that accompany them) existing between Oedipus, Laius, and Jocasta, Oedipus Rex would merely be some play about a heroic guy who killed a foreign king and married the queen. Audiences respond with such repulsion and sympathy to Oedipus because his downfall was brought about by the frailty of human nature intrinsic to all humanity, a complexity that may be mirrored, usually to a lesser degree, in our own tumultuous lives. Consider the tangled relationship between Agamemnon, Clytemnestra, Orestes, and Electra. While the typical family may not experience the death of a father at the hands of their mother, the themes of adultery and infidelity, as well as the following struggle to reestablish workable family relationships, is a scenario all too common in modern societies. Tragedy, alone of all the genres, leaves the mind with a lot to think about, a lesson to be learned, and human heroes who are hard to forget. I love it.

Allison Evans

June 20, 2010

Shades of Grey

So far throughout the course I have learned more than I expected to about the genres in general and more specifically the genre of Tragedy. Walking into this  course I felt as though knew the basics behind tragedies, and that was based upon the idea that tragedies showed only the darker side of the world and cut out the unrealistic ideals of riding off into the sunset with your prince to live happily-ever-after. At this point the only stand out characteristic in my mind to describe a tragedy was the darkness and sadness the audience felt for the hero.

During our time in class we have discussed several traits of tragedies and the characters within them. One of the most interesting traits to me that we have gone over pertains to the characters’ state of mind. I love how tragedies make it so that no person is all good or all bad. Most of the characters have both redeeming and evil features. This trait allows the characters to become more relatable to the audience personalizing the issues at hand. These issues that the main characters face are often full of complications that make any answer both right and wrong depending on the point of view the audience member has.  If you look at the story the Orestia we see this first hand. Agamemnon was faced with an extremely tough decision. He had to choose whether to kill the hundreds of men he had already sent off to war who were at sea, or sacrifice his daughter. He chose that the good of his country and all of those men outweighed the need to keep his daughter alive. The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few. There was no right or wrong answer to this predicament, and both of the solutions that Agamemnon had entailed hurting those around him dearly. This aspect of a more humanized conflict is one that has not been brought to light in my reading of several known tragedies such as Hamlet. In reading Hamlet in particular, the focus was always on the mental state of Hamlet or the deception that occurred, never the complicated conflicts and decisions that each of the characters had to face.

While I am learning a lot about the genre of tragedy and its characteristics, I have to work on understanding there are two sides to conflicts in a tragedy, and that these conflicts are not always black and white. Several times I have read something and just said well that’s completely wrong, or that’s the right answer, with no real thought to what went into the characters decision or the good that the other choice could have brought into the situation.  My growth in this area is occurring mainly through class discussions. Hearing the other student’s ideas and perspectives about what is going on in a text allows me to re-evaluate the situation that the character is in and to see the text in a different way.

Whitney Evans, untitled

At the start of this course, I considered myself fairly well versed in the realm of tragedy.  Having dissected it quite thoroughly in a few other classes, my knowledge seemed quite extensive.  The rules were straightforward, clear, nearly set in stone.  To the untrained eye (read: mine) tragedy was almost simple; in the end, everyone dies!  Fortunately, there’s much more to tragedy than the fatality of the protagonist. 

          My knowledge of tragedy has begun to blossom nicely.  Where my only two experiences before were with O’Neill’s A Moon for the Misbegotten and Shakespeare’s Hamlet, in which both main characters die miserably in the end, reading more has definitely opened my mind to new ideas about the construct of tragedy.  For example, Oedipus’s character has broadened my horizons significantly.  In Oedipus the King, by Sophocles, Oedipus has done something wretched.  He has fathered his mother’s children and murdered his father.  At the very same time, he is the man who defeated the Sphinx and saved Thebes.  He is the King of Thebes.  But even with this power and skill he is still completely vulnerable.  Not even the great king is immune to catastrophe.  A crown is merely a piece of metal when the foundation of its wearer is built upon sand.  Tragedy is very humanizing.  Even Prince Hamlet, the richest young fellow in the land battles insanity, a trait set on by the death of his father.  Insanity!  These characters are the elite nobility, the cream of the crop, but it seems that with this stature, the old cliché is true:  it’s a long, hard fall from the top.

          Perhaps this is why tragedy is so intense.  Is it more difficult to see a man with everything lose everything?  Or is it worse to see a man kicked when he is down?  Maybe, since the poor, degraded man has less to lose, his dilemmas are less tragic.  Or, since these royal characters are the leaders of men and countries, their downfalls are witnessed and felt by that many more people.  Even though the people themselves don’t have to deal personally with the guilt of having bedded their mothers, the stain of shame is still laid upon them.  A more modern example of this could be the global reputation of a United States President.  The entire country can be praised or shamed because of the actions of one man. 

          The value here is that every man, however rich or brilliant, can still lose everything, including his will to live or his life itself.  Everyone is vulnerable.  No on is safe.  So, with that in mind, is vulnerability the true tragic flaw of every person?  Everyone has a weakness, a bad characteristic, be it a hot temper or arrogance, but inevitably, these flawed traits make us vulnerable and blind to what threatens to be our downfall.  What is truly tragic is that we are all afflicted with this flaw.  What makes this tragedy so beautiful is that without it, life would be simple and lack the depth needed to find ourselves.  Without these tragic struggles, what would life be worth?  To quote a favorite movie, A League of Their Own, “It’s supposed to be hard.  If it wasn’t hard, everyone would do it.  The hard is what makes it great” (Marshall). 

Rachel Jungklaus

June 20, 2010

Tragic Experience

          My experience with Tragedy as a genre has been quite limited. In all of my previous school experience, I had never read a tragedy written by any author except for William Shakespeare. While I believe that Shakespeare is one of the greatest playwrights, or maybe writers, that history has ever known, I know now that he was not the inventor of tragic plays. My literature education, I can now say with a certain measure of assurance, has been sorely lacking in Tragedy, it seems a bit tragic really. Even broader than tragedy, though, is the instruction on genres and plays in general has come up short in my education. What has happened to the education system that a student can go through sixteen years of schooling and still have to look up ‘genre’ on Dictionary.com?

          In high school, I learned about tragic heroes and their tragic flaws, but the way Mrs. Owen, my 10^th grade English teacher, told it everyone has a tragic flaw. Now that I think about it, my 11^th grade English teacher Mr. Neff did a spinoff of that, but it was our “Greatest Sin” project after we read the Scarlet Letter. We all had to make a letter, and wear it all day, of our greatest sin, and frequently it was also our tragic flaw, or it would be if we died because of it. Anyhow, it seemed like that was the other discussion we ever had on tragedies, “What was their tragic flaw? How do you know? How could things have played out differently if not for the tragic flaw?” That and the plot of the story. We always had to draw a plot line and show the different points in the story that had an effect. It always upset me because the story could not have been that way if not for every detail, right?

          The difference between high school and the university, besides the number of students and difficulty of the lessons, is that where a high school teacher would point out something like “tragic flaw” and leave the discussion there. A university professor, on the other hand, would ask all kinds of deep, thoughtful questions to draw out the discussion, occasionally learning as much as teaching. It never ceases to amaze me, the limits that public schools put on students’ minds.

Already this semester I have learned about genres, tragedy, comedy, satire, romance, spectacle, the sublime, Greek playwrights, the Ancient Greek theatre, masks, and so much more. There is never an end to what a person can learn when it comes to literature. And I plan on spending the rest of my life learning about it, starting with everything I can find on tragedy.

Danielle Maldonado

The Learning Experience of an Educator

Upon signing up for the course, I wasn’t enthusiastic about reading tragedy. I teach American Literature and have a much more sophisticated interest in 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 befell Kings, Queens and nobles made it less relatable and less interesting to me as a reader.

I must admit that even as a teacher, 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. 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. And 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 that fall into it may be, could be applied, characteristically, to modern and American 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.

The idea that the four basic narrative genres could be applied to modern art appealed to me and I got the idea to use song to teach the genres that are represented within American Literature next year. After thinking further, I’ve done this already last year but for a different purpose. Using Johnny Cash’s The Long Black Veil, you could teach tragedy to high school students.