final exam assignment

LITR 4533 TRAGEDY  Final Exam Samples 2014 (final exam assignment) Essay 1: Overall Learning Experience

Mickey Thames

Round and Round: Tragedy and Humanity

            In my Midterm, I described my initial thoughts upon entering the class, reflections on a few weeks of reading, but I felt I didn’t quite get to the true core of what the class was offering. It was after finishing Birth of Tragedy, and the last page of Desire Under the Elms, that I knew I wanted to offer was how I saw Tragedies now.

Who would have ever thought that Nietzsche would actually help to clarify understanding of a subject? All anyone ever credits him for is robbing humanity of any divine purpose and being a general grump about things. But what one has to remember is that like all humans before, and all humans after, Nietzsche was a human. Which means, at one point in his life, he was a fresh faced young man, full of hope and vision, and this view shows in Birth of Tragedy, what I believe is the most influential text I have read this semester.

            The magic of Birth of Tragedy stems from its transformation of the Greeks, from a pristine, peerless civilization of marble and laurel, to a very troubled and rowdy gang. Basically, Nietzsche makes them human again. It is this humanizing of the Greeks that, in my view, made the classic Tragedies of Oedipus, Agamemnon, and The Bacchae relatable and approachable. Because the works are so old, and so lauded, many people don’t even attempt to approach these great works simply because they believe them to be “beyond” them. What the conversations I witnessed this semester told me was very different. They can still stun, surprise, and move to tears those who take in the ancient words, the stories we grew up with but never really knew.

 By looking into the works, Nietzsche teased out two very important concepts, the Dionysian and the Apolline. The Apolline are the contributions and foundations of Aristotle’s Poetics, those logical rules that separate and individualize the many and sundry genres, while the Dionysian are more ethereal in context, containing no specific rules or categories of their own, merely embodied by a few images and ideas, such as wine, revelry, ecstasy, and passions, both good and bad. While the Apolline separated, the Dionysian combined. 

These two forces, both in opposition and contained in human actions, form the basis of Tragedy. When I saw the underlying forces, I couldn’t help but also begin connecting dots, and those dots seemed to make a circle. The Apolline would create order, the order would rule for a while until we came to the events of the plays, when then the Dionysian would tear down the established order, but by the end, new wisdom would come forth from the loss, even if it meant the death of (quite a few) characters. A great cycle, turning throughout every story in some form or another, feeding itself, killing itself, and then rising once again.

It’s these rare, perspective-shifting moments of understanding that keep me opening new books that I may not like, what got me through Samson Agonistes (at least the first time, I’ll have to read it again), and what keeps me reading in general. What I learned from Tragedy is that, there is always more to learn, more to uncover, more ideas to take in, and more old ideas to tear apart. What Tragedy teaches is that loss is not merely a plot point, but an immutable fact that allows us to grow. Yes, it hurts, but we grow from it, we adapt and become stronger because of it. And it prepares us for more pain down the road.
            This is why these works are still being taught, why we will always hear of the ignorance of Oedipus, of the troubles of Hamlet, of the pain of Phaedra, and the death of Dionysus. While it all sounds very pessimistic, as Andy Feith remarks in his “The Severity of Tragedy”, Tragedy “identifies and isolates suffering as an essential fact of life. It takes suffering as its topic.” And what is more relatable, or more human, than getting together and complaining about how hard we all have it?

            A final thought- many of the newer translations of the plays of Sophocles have as their title not “The Tragedy of Oedipus” or “The Theban Plays.” Rather, they are translated as “The Oedipus Cycle.” A cycle that repeats, over and over, waiting for you to go again, to see, what can you learn this time?