LIT 110/GED 117: GREAT

BOOKS
PROF. MARITES TAMAYO-FAGARAGAN
DEPARTMENT OF ARTS AND LETTERS
TRIVIA

• The Bible is composed of 66 books, written in various languages

over a period of roughly 1,500 years by over 40 men on three
continents (Africa, Asia, and Europe)
• These human writers came from vastly different backgrounds,
occupations and perspectives. They were fishermen, shepherds,
military men, kings, a royal cupbearer, a medical doctor, a tax
collector, a tentmaker, and others. Some wrote in prison, while
others penned their words in palace.
TRAGEDY: AN INTRODUCTION

• In common usage today means little more than a sad or

unnecessarily unpleasant event: a motorway crash in which
several people died is described as a ‘tragedy’ in the newspaper;
• A promising career cut shortly by cheating is described as ‘tragic’.
• But in drama, the term ‘tragedy’ is specific, even technical, and
refers to a particular type of play.
GREEK TRAGEDY

• Greek tragedy sprang from dithyrambs (choral songs to Dionysus);

when dialogue was included in these, tragedy developed as a
distinct genre.
• In about 534 BC the poet Thespis is said to have introduced
dialogue between the chorus (or its representative) and a choral
leader, and in about 500 BC, Aeschylus introduced a second actor,
thereby making dialogue independent of the chorus.
GREEK TRAGEDY

• On November 23, 534 BCE, legend holds that the Greek performer
Thespis recited lines as someone other than himself—becoming the
world’s first actor. Today, all actors are called “thespians” in his
honor.
• Before this time, theater performances were either storytelling or
“choral” productions.
• Storytellers not only told stories of Greek gods and heroes, they
also danced and sang. A Greek chorus was a group of between 12
and 50 performers who spoke in unison and often wore masks.
• Thespis was allegedly performing as part of a chorus when he
stepped forward. He spoke lines written for the chorus by himself,
in character as the Greek god Dionysus.
GREEK TRAGEDY

• Tragedy was considered to be a kind of poetry; poets, and hence

tragedians, were regarded as teachers of morality and religion, and
tragedies were performed at annual festivals rich with civic and religious
significance.
• The classic tragedies of Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides, all written
in the fifth century BC, dramatize well-known myths involving important
and powerful families, sometimes in altered forms.
• There were no female tragedians and all roles were performed by men,
including those of female characters.
• Tragedy arose out of ritual, and the exclusively male participation in
ritual reinforced a gender-linked social hierarchy.
ROMAN TRAGEDY

• Tragedies were written during Roman times, notably by the Roman

Stoic politician and philosopher Seneca.
• He emphasized the nobility of suffering and gave little attention
to action.
• His works were filled with rhetorical conceits, and are now
generally held to be affected, sentimental and bombastic.
• Horace’s Ars Poetica proposed that poetry (including tragedy)
is utile dulce, ‘delightful instruction’: poetry is seen here as a
form of rhetoric that is styled to give pleasure and moral
instruction.
PLATO ON TRAGEDY

• Plato refused to allow imitative or mimetic poetry (as opposed to

narrative poetry) into the Republic, his ideal state.
• One reason was that poetry often portrays things that are not true and
describes gods doing things that are not good models for behaviour
(Republic 387b et passim).
• Another was that most people enjoy giving vent to emotions; we do not
enjoy representations of intelligent and temperate dispositions
(Republic 604e), but what we do enjoy vicariously tends to become part
of ourselves (Republic 606b).
• The audience’s vicarious pleasure in experiencing appetites (for
example, sex) and pains and pleasures ‘of the soul’ (anger) strengthens
those appetites when they ought to be weakened and brought under the
control of reason (Republic 606d).
• To Plato (in the dialogue on the Laws) the state was the noblest
work of art, a representation (mimēsis) of the fairest and best
life. He feared the tragedians’ command of the expressive
resources of language, which might be used to the detriment of
worthwhile institutions. He feared, too, the emotive effect of
poetry, the Dionysian element that is at the very basis of tragedy.
Therefore, he recommended that the tragedians submit their
works to the rulers, for approval, without which they could not be
performed. It is clear that tragedy, by nature exploratory, critical,
independent, could not live under such a regimen.
ARISTOTLE’S RESPONSE TO PLATO

• Aristotle’s Poetics is probably the single most influential work on

tragedy ever written (see Aristotle).
• In contrast to Plato, Aristotle argued that writing tragedy required
an understanding of the functions of tragedy and of the principles
that ensure that those functions are fulfilled.
• Writing good tragedy thus develops reason.
• He also argued that some pleasure gained from tragedy derives
from learning about the things imitated, so that responses to it
are cognitively rewarding.
ARISTOTLE’S RESPONSE TO PLATO
• Aristotle’s famous definition of tragedy at the beginning of
chapter six of the Poetics differentiates it from other types of
imitation (painting, music, dithyramb, epic, comedy).
• He defines tragedy as "the imitation of an action that is serious
and also as having magnitude, complete in itself."
• He continues, "Tragedy is a form of drama exciting the emotions of
pity and fear.
• Its action should be single and complete, presenting a reversal of
fortune, involving persons renowned and of superior attainments,
and it should be written in poetry, embellished with every kind of
artistic expression
ARISTOTLE’S RESPONSE TO PLATO
• The writer presents "incidents arousing pity and fear, wherewith
to interpret its catharsis of such emotions" (by catharsis, Aristotle
means a purging or sweeping away of the pity and fear aroused by
the tragic action).
• The basic difference Aristotle draws between tragedy and other
genres, such as comedy and the epic, is the "tragic pleasure of
pity and fear" the audience feel watching a tragedy.
• In order for the tragic hero to arouse these feelings in the
audience, he cannot be either all good or all evil but must be
someone the audience can identify with; however, if he is superior
in some way(s), the tragic pleasure is intensified.
ARISTOTLE’S RESPONSE TO PLATO
• His disastrous end results from a mistaken action, which in turn
arises from a tragic flaw or from a tragic error in judgment.
• Often the tragic flaw is hubris, an excessive pride that causes the
hero to ignore a divine warning or to break a moral law.
• It has been suggested that because the tragic hero's suffering is
greater than his offense, the audience feels pity; because the
audience members perceive that they could behave similarly, they
feel pity.
ARISTOTLE’S RESPONSE TO PLATO
• The suffering that elicits pity and fear comes about through the
actions of an agent who makes some kind of mistake or error in
judgment (hamartia).
• Even very good people can make mistakes when subjected to
forces beyond their control: we thus pity them (since pity is the
appropriate response to undeserved misfortune) and fear for them
and for ourselves (since if it can happen to people better than
ourselves it can certainly happen to us).
• Aristotle allowed that tragedies could even have happy endings,
on the grounds that the threat of suffering is capable of
generating the ‘tragic emotions’.
• Aristotle considered the plot to be the soul of a tragedy,
with character in second place. The goal of tragedy is not
suffering but the knowledge that issues from it, as
the denouement issues from a plot. The most powerful elements
of emotional interest in tragedy, according to Aristotle, are
reversal of intention or situation (peripeteia) and recognition
scenes (anagnōrisis), and each is most effective when it is
coincident with the other.
Reference

• https://www.britannica.com/art/tragedy-literature/Theory-of-
tragedy