This week in class, we spent another week focusing on tragedy. Instead of looking at the big picture of the genre, we went a little deeper and tried to connect tragedy with other things. Watching the TED talk about success helped open my eyes and see that tragedy isn't a subject that stands alone and that there is much more to it than meets the eye. We also read the story of Oedipus, which is a story of true tragedy. This story focuses on one man's downfall from hero to zero. In other words, it focused on human suffering, the core of tragedy. Reading this story really helped me to better understand the main idea of an aspect of literature that is tricky for me to understand. Along with reading the legend of Oedipus, we were able to read an article entitled The Tragic Fallacy. This article furthered my understanding of tragedy by sharing that tragedy is not only about misery; but also about the triumph that man has achieved. With these two pieces of work, I was able to immensely expand my appreciation for the subject. With each new tidbit of knowledge that I gain with this unit, my fondness for literature, and tragedy especially, grows.
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Tragedy is the thing that we are now discussing in class. Learning about tragedy is interesting, for I had already had an idea of what the genre was about, and I realized that there is much more to it than what meets the eye. For example, I had already known that tragedy is based off human suffering and those emotions of pain and despair. But something that was previously unknown to me was that tragedy is not only in literature, but also in our natural world. In an article that we read off Wikipedia, Tragedy of the commons, it was made aware to me that our environment is in a state of tragedy. The article illustrates this tragedy in our surroundings by saying, "We may be living in the current tragedy of climate change based on the assertion that our short-term goals (manufacturing and production - CO2 emissions) are at odds with the long-term goal of survival for future generations." This quote opened my eyes to the fact that tragedy is all around us. We are given the responsibilities of the protagonists of our own stories, and right now, the current state of many of our stories is a tragedy. But some could argue that we are actually living in a dramatic irony, considering the decline of our environment due to mankind's own fault and because of the current state of our political election. But you know, everything is in the eye of the beholder. What's the state of your own story? |
AuthorCailin Rose Russell Archives
April 2017
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