Week-by week breakdown

1: Tragedy and Ritual

We’ll have our little tragedy test (30 mins) at the beginning of this first two-hour class.

Tragedy and Ritual

Greek tragedy Shakespeare Other Theory
Euirpides, Bacchae Excerpts from Much D. H. Lawrence, Short excerpts from
Ado About Nothing ‘Odour of Arnold van Gennep,
Chrysanthemums’ Rites of Passage;
Mary Douglas,
Purity and Danger
Other texts or cultural events you might explore in your essay:
 compare four versions of ‘Odour of Chrysanthemums’ here:
http://odour.nottingham.ac.uk/index.asp;

 look for other tragedies centering around a ritual: e.g. Garcìa Lorca, Blood Wedding

 in conjunction with Shakespearean funerals: Order for the Burial of the Dead, in The
Book of Common Prayer: The Texts of 1549, 1559, and 1662, ed. by Brian Cummings
(Oxford, 2011), 82-9.

 Shakespeare’s the tragicomedies and problematic comedies such as Much Ado About
Nothing (this one has both a wedding and a funeral!), or think about poor Ophelia’s
‘maimed rites’.

 the trial of Adolf Eichmann (e.g. film material, Hannah Arendt’s newspaper reports,
her book Eichmann in Jerusalem, A Report on the Banality of Evil)

 the execution of Sadam Hussein (you could approach this through newspaper articles,
or through Cathryn McClymond, Ritual Gone Wrong: What we learn from Ritual
Disruption).

But these are just ideas. You can write your essay on the three texts we discuss
in class, mix them up with others, or suggest texts of your own choice.

I’d like to invite you to make up your own questions. But if you prefer to work on a
previous exam question on this topic, here are some:
 1. ‘We recognize that [disorder] is destructive to existing patterns; also that it has
potentiality.’ (MARY DOUGLAS)

Is this insight relevant to tragedy?

2. ‘When I see these people washing up on the shore, I feel that life has rejected them.
So why should we reject them? Why should we reject giving our African brothers a
proper burial?’ (CHAMSEDDINE MARZOUG, overseer of anonymous graves for
drowned migrants in Zarzis, Tunisia, 27th January 2018).

Use this quotation to discuss burial and/or migration and tragedy.

3. Chorus: Give us this day our proper rituals! Give us some fucking ceremony!’
(EMILY BERRY, ‘Tragedy for Once Voice’)

Consider the significance of choric voices and/or ritual in tragedy.

4. Write about repetition as it relates to tragedy.

5. ‘Tragedy is an art preoccupied with death. It is, at least in part, an appropriation of the
traditional art of women and we sense in its language, its inscrutable echoes of music
and dance, an older body of ritual, a sub-stratum which informs and at times
introduces itself into an urban, male art.’ (GAIL HOLST-WARHAFT)

Discuss tragedy’s affinities to the rites and rituals associated with death and
mourning.

2: Tragic Language

Tragic Language
Greek tragedy Shakespeare Other Theory
Euirpides, Hecuba Hamlet Paul Celan, ‘Todesfuge’ Tony Harrison,
[Death fugue] and excerpts ‘Facing Up to the
from Adorno’s response Muses’
Other texts and cultural phenomena that you might like to explore in your essays:
 Segal’s Euripides and the Poetics of Sorrow

 Simon and Garfunkel, ‘The Sound of Silence’ (song)

 Annie Proulx, Brokeback Mountain (Short story and/or film by Ang Lee)

 Harold Pinter, A Slight Ache (1961) – originally a radio play, then performed on stage
 Again, these are just ideas. You can write your essay on the three texts we
discuss in class, or suggest a text of your own choice.

I’d like to invite you to make up your own questions. But if you prefer to work on a
previous exam question on this topic, here are some:

1. ‘Language as a speaking thing, neither my master nor my instrument, is amiably

indifferent to me.’ (DENISE RILEY) Does tragedy challenge this view?

2. ‘It is different for a man to ventriloquize a woman’s voice than for a woman to speak
in a masculine voice, since gender itself is asymmetrically constructed in relation to
power.’ (ELIZABETH D. HARVEY) Write about the voices of men and women
(authors and-or characters and/or audience members and/or critics) in tragedy.

3. ‘Pray for the Mute who have no word to say.’

Cried the one old gentleman, ‘Not because they are dumb,
But they are weak. And the weak thoughts beating in the brain
Generate a sort of heat, yet cannot speak.
Thoughts that are bound without sound
In the tomb of the brain’s room, wound. Pray for the Mute. (STEVE SMITH)
Consider the possibilities of worldless tragedy.

4. ‘And as the frog, to croak, squats with his jaws

Just out of water…

So were these wretched ghosts embedded in
The ice, blue to the gills; and like a crowd
Of storks, they clacked their teeth.’
(DANTE, Inferno, translated by Ciaran Carson)
Explore the role played by figurative language in tragedy.

5. ‘Words are only made for … saying the sayable, that is, everything except what rules
us or makes us live or matters or what we are’. (JAVIER CERCAS, translation based
on Anne McLean), Discuss ‘the sayable’ and its limits in tragedy.

3: Tragic Space

Tragic Space
Greek tragedy Shakespeare Other Theory
 Sophocles, Electra King Lear Jean Racine, Siegfried Kracauer, Theory
Phèdre of Film: The Redemption of
Physical Reality [excerpt]
Other texts and cultural phenomena that you might like to explore in your essays:
 Ibsen, Doll’s House

 John Osborne, Look Back in Anger,

 Garcìa Lorca, Bernada Alba’s House—you might want to connect this to Marcus
Gardley, The House That Will Not Stand (2014)

Again, these are just ideas. You can write your essay on the three texts we
discuss in class, or suggest a text of your own choice.

I’d like to invite you to make up your own questions. But if you prefer to work on a
previous exam question on this topic, here are some:

1. ‘What else is there to do when you have no home of your own after all, but to create
a place of your own?’ (EKOW ESHUN) Explore tragic representations of belonging
and not belonging.

2. ‘Woman is never anything more than the scene of more or less rival exchange
between two men.’ (LUCE IRIGARAY) Is that an adequate description of women in
tragedy?

3. Write an essay on homesickness.

4. Write an essay on exits and entrances.

5. ‘She had lost the ability to keep her discrete worlds discrete—a skill that many
consider to be the cornerstone of sanity. The traffic inside her head seemed to have
stopped believing in traffic lights. The result was incessant noise, a few bad crashes
and eventually gridlock.’ (ARUNDHATI ROY) Use this quotation to explore
madness and/or boundaries in tragedy.

4: Tragedy and Pity

 Tragic Affect: Pity
Greek tragedy Shakespeare Other Theory
Sophocles, Richard III George Short excerpts from Aristotle Poetics
Philoctetes Eliot, Mill and Rhetoric; Excerpts from Jeannette
on the Floss King, Tragedy and the Victorian Novel
(1979)

Other texts and cultural phenomena that you might like to explore in your essays:
 Martha Nussbaum, ‘The “Morality” of Pity’, in Nevitt & Pollard, Reader in Tragedy
(2019)

 The most rigorous investigation of pity by Shakespeare is Coriolanus.

 Dürrenmatt, Der Besuch der Alten Dame [The Visit]

 John Ford, ‘Tis a Pity She’s a Whore

 John Ford, The Broken Heart

 Charles Figley, Compassion Fatigue: Coping with Secondary Traumatic Stress

Disorder in Those Who Treat the Traumatized (1995), ch. 1, p.1-20;

 Pity and the BBC news, or BBC Red Nose Day

 Animal welfare and environmental issues: what happens to tragic pity if humans are
no longer the only ones who suffer undeservedly? Can animals be tragic?

 Pity is closely associated with revenge. Maybe you’d like to investigate its role in
revenge tragedies? John Kerrigan wrote a stunning book about those.

Alternatively, you can take your essay into another direction and write on the topic “tragedy
and the novel”.

Again, these are just ideas. You can write your essay on the three texts we
discuss in class, or suggest a text of your own choice.

I’d like to invite you to make up your own questions. But if you prefer to work on a
previous exam question on this topic, here are some:
1. Discuss the role played by tears in tragedies

2. ‘Pity me, and like a painter [grapheus] stand back a little [apostatheis] and see what
misery is mine…’ (EURIPIDES, 424BC). Write about the inter-relations of pity and
distance for an audience in the tragic theatre.
 3. ‘It is easy to see how the human imagination might begin to exhibit a need, in art, for
a death-game, a game in which the muscles of psychic response, fear and pity, are
exercised, and made ready, through a facing the worst, which is not yet the real
worst.’ (A. D. NUTTALL) Does tragedy meet this need, or does it create it?

4. ‘The tragedians who wrote the plays were drawn to focus on what was painful and
precarious in contemporary imagination. Audiences shared this pain and
precariousness. They were the people whose pain it was, and they were
overpoweringly drawn to explore it with their dramatists.’ (RUTH PADEL) Discuss
the place of the audience in tragedy.

5. ‘The tragic novel works through egoism and suffering to some kind of salvation.’
Discuss. You may, but need not, limit your discussion to novels.

5: Tragedy and Time

Tragic Time
Greek tragedy Shakespeare Other Theory
Aeschylus, Oresteia Winter’s Tale J. M. Coetzee, Hayden White, Introduction
Age of Iron to Metahistory
Other texts and cultural phenomena that you might like to explore in your essays:
 Tom Stoppard, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead

 Beckett, Warten auf Godot

 Jez Butterworth, The Ferryman

Related exam questions are:

1. ‘I have known all before, / all that shall be, and clearly known; to me / nothing that
hurts shall come with a new face.’ (Prometheus, in AESCHYLUS, Prometheus
Bound) Write about tragedies uses of foreknowledge.

2. ‘The past lies all before us, the future lies all behind us.’ (ANCIENT GREEK
ADVERB) Discuss the relation of past, present and future in tragedy.
 3. ‘[Texts] are pliable and sticky artifacts gripped, molded, and stamped with new
meanings by every generation of readers, and they come to us irreversibly altered by
their experience.’ (JULIA GAISSER) Is this quotation useful for reflecting on post-
colonial tragedy?

4. ‘You can’t put the past behind you. It’s buried in you; it’s turned your flesh into its
own cupboard.’ (CLAUDIA RANKINE) Consider the implications of this quotation
for tragedy.

5. ‘Man hands on misery to man.

It deepens like a coastal shelf.

Get out as early as you can,
And don’t have any kids yourself.’ (PHILIP LARKIN)
Use this quotation to write about tragedy and generations.

6: Tragic Female Lament

This week, I’d like to invite you to also consider pop songs, ballet (lament can be
danced!) or opera. Think Puccini’s Mimi in La Boheme, or Nina Simone, Back to Black, or
Taylor Swift, ‘Teardrops on My Guitar’. Take your pick!

Other great topics include:

 Powerful laments in Greek tragedy: Hecuba; Polyxena; Helen; Andromache. On

female voices in Greek literature: you can find an overview of literature in Casey
Dué, The Captive Woman’s Lament in Greek Tragedy; Helen P. Foley, Female Acts
in Greek Tragedy (2001) and Making Silence Speak: Women’s Voices in Greek
Literature and Society (ed. by André Lardinois and Laura McClure (2001)

 Explore the concept of pathea melea

 Shakespeare: the amazing ‘A Lover’s Complaint’ (edition: John Kerrigan)

 Latin literature: Ovid’s Heroides

 Medieval lament tradition: ‘The Wife’s Lament’, ‘Wulf and Eadwacer’

 Medieval and Early modern lament, see John Kerrigan (ed.), Motives of Woe:
Shakespeare and ‘Female Complaint’: A Critical Anthology (1991), with an excellent
introduction
  On the power of female lament in Greek tragedy, particularly as early modern English
readers saw it, see Tanya Pollard, Greek Tragic Women on Shakespearean Stages
(2017).

 OPERA: Ruth Padel, ‘Let me die’, The Guardian, Saturday 16 June 2007; Charlotte
Higgins, ‘Is Opera the most misogynistic art form ever?’, The Guardian, Fri 26 Feb
2016 15.00 GMT

 On the eroticism of the dying woman: Elizabeth Bronfen, Over her Dead Body;

 There is a powerful link between the topic of female lament to the classic exam topics
tragic pity, revenge tragedy, and tragic language.

I’d like to invite you to make up your own questions. But if you prefer to work on a
previous exam question on this topic, here are some:

1. ‘What else is the cry of tragedy but a lament that happy states are overthrown by the
indiscriminate blows of fortune?’ (BOETHIUS, The Consolation of Philosophy,
translation by S. J. Tester). Discuss.

2. ‘So she spoke, weeping, and the other women added their laments; mourning
Patroclus, each one mourned her own sorrows.’ (HOMER) Consider the dynamics of
lamentation in light of this quotation.

3. ‘Tragedy is full of men and women who lament and the evidence of tragedy alone
would not lead us to regard mourning as a particularly gendered activity.’ (L.A.
SWIFT) Is the work of mourning gendered in tragedy?

4. ‘The kick inside is in the line that finally gets you/ and it feels so good to hurt so bad/
and suffer just enough to sing the blues.’ (BERNIE TAUPIN) Consider the extent to
which songs or lyrics can register, represent or stand in for some larger or deeper
sense of tragedy.

5. ‘In those who have suffered too many blows, in slaves, for example, that place in the
heart from which the infliction of evil evokes a cry of surprise may seem to be dead.
But it is never quite dead; it is simply unable to cry out any more. It has sunk into a
state of dumb and ceaseless lamentation.’ (SIMONE WEIL) Discuss tragic
lamentation in the light of this comments.