LITR 4533 Tragedy UHCL 2012 final exam samples

LITR 4533 TRAGEDY
Final Exam Samples 2012

Essays & Excerpts on Part A:
Overall Learning Experience

Andy Feith

The Severity of Tragedy

My impression of tragedy is that it self-consciously reaches for high seriousness and gravity in a way that comedy, romance, and satire do not. We’ve covered quite a variety of authors in this course, ranging from ancient Greece to 17^th-century Europe to 20^th century America, but if there is one attitude toward the world which all these men share, it might be their heightened awareness of the limits of a man’s ambitions. They excel at giving their audience a step-by-step, cause-and-effect demonstration of how the best-laid plans of the most conscientious men and women can go horribly awry. In the Greek tragedies, the chorus often warns us that an arrogant or greedy or self-satisfied man will be cut down to size by the gods for overstepping the boundaries of humility; a selfish man who is not sufficiently reverent toward the gods will receive his just punishment for not staying in his proper place. The later tragedies, even though they don’t stress the role of the gods in policing over-arrogant mortals, still stress the destructive potential of human passions. It’s a severe worldview, unique and different from the hypothetical “worldviews” of romance, comedy and tragedy. To put it another way, a person who only ever read or watched tragedies, excluding any other kind of literature, would have a vastly different point of view than a person who only ever consumed romances, or satires, or comedies.

I remember thinking when I was younger, “I wish I could find a work of literature where no character is written off as inhuman or beyond redemption, where even the ‘villains’ are human beings, where every character is treated with compassion.” The first novel I read that I consciously noticed for meeting these criteria was Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina. I may just as well have turned to the canon of tragedy, however, where “The problem is intimate and integral to the central human identity; it is not "objectified" to a villain or outside force, as in romance. Good and bad are not split, but mixed” (Course site; terms: “tragedy”). Even satire, because it is so rooted in a particular moment in history and refers to that moment’s ruling class, tends to mock and caricature. Comedies may or may not treat their characters as morally complex human beings, depending on the comedy. In terms of the overall plot structure, comedy and tragedy are opposites, but they both have the potential to depict realistic characters. Tragedy will highlight characters with tragic flaws, and a comedy might have characters with those very same flaws, yet in the context of a comedy those characters will most likely be spared the devastation that comes to Oedipus or Willy Loman.

We’ve heard that good literature both entertains and informs. The severity of tragedy makes it more suited to inform (in the classical sense of the word favored by Wendell Berry, “to form from within”) than to entertain. Literature students (and professors!) may extol the glories of literature all day, but it has always been the case that the majority of consumers of literature have looked more for escapism and a good time than for a serious examination of a difficult problem. I think if I were teaching tragedy at a high school level, I might emphasize to my students that tragedy is often called the greatest genre, but that it is also the most demanding and therefore has the smallest audience. It’s telling that the tragedy most often assigned to high school students is Antigone, with its young, idealistic and essentially likable heroine and its authoritarian, angry, unsympathetic Creon. In that sense it fits more into the model of romance than tragedy. Antigone is right, Creon is wrong. Though the ending does exemplify tragedy: Creon is utterly devastated and in the rawest sort of grief, and the chorus drive home the final point that the punishment of the gods is what causes a man to develop wisdom.

Aristotle writes that “Tragedy… is an imitation of an action that is serious, complete, and of a certain magnitude.” This much we have discussed. He further writes that tragedy takes “the form of action, not of narrative”. We are always privy to the characters’ processes of decision-making that lead directly to their demise. Arthur Miller wrote that “the task of the real intellectual consists of analyzing illusions in order to discover their causes” and that “Above all else, tragedy requires the finest appreciation by the writer of cause and effect.” Satire may share with tragedy a tendency to disassemble collective societal illusions, but tragedy focuses more on individuals and individual families and their illusions. A tragedian must possess the gifts of both a journalist and a detective; not only must they show how Event A led to Events B, C, and D, but the best of them complicate the issue by distributing blame among many characters and giving those characters decisions to make that have no easy or satisfying answer. Miller (again) said that it is a popular misconception that tragedy is the most pessimistic of literary genres. This need not conflict with my idea that tragedy is characterized by severity. Like the first noble truth of Buddhism, tragedy identifies and isolates suffering as an essential fact of life. It takes suffering as its topic. And with the chorus at Antigone, it draws comfort from the notion that suffering will always be the most powerful teacher, that those whom the gods punish are thereby made (more) wise.