Yesterday we watched a ted talk that had nothing to do with tragedy. It was actually really interesting and was my favorite one we've watched. His main argument is that people really aren't in control of themselves as much as they think. He goes on to explain how easily people can be influenced. I really liked his talk and thought it was interesting. Now the tricky part is figuring out how this relates to tragedy. One way it could relate is that for most of it he's talking about a flaw in humans: they can easily be influenced and "tricked' into choosing certain things. In Tragedies the main character always has a flaw, so maybe that's one way they can relate. The fact that humans often don't understand their mental limitations is a tragedy.
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Oedipus is one of the most famous tragics ever written. It's practically the definition of a tragedy. It was written by Shakesp... I mean Sophocles. Like any tragedy, the main character is trying to make a place for himself in the world. But of course he has a flaw. Oedipus's is his destined to kill his father and marry his mother. He tries everything in his power to avoid this, but of course it had already happened and he just didn't know it. As he goes searching around, he finds out and then he gouges out his eyes. Pretty tragic.
We read and close read Arthur Millers blog called Tragedy and the Common man. I'm going to be completely honest, his article is a disaster. I have no idea what hes talking about. I've read it so many times through, each time very carefully and thinking hard. We even talked about it a lot in class. I even have Sana's paper with everything she highlighted on it and I still have literally no clue. I just can not wrap my brain around it. He's talking about tragedy and how there aren't as many of them written today. I have no idea what his main point is. There seems to be no structure to his article. Now some people would read this and talk about how great and smart it is, and how well written it is because he doesn't follow the boring 5 paragraph structure and he doesn't plan state his thesis and stuff. Now I'm fine with that part, but I'd argue that the paper is not well written if almost nobody can understand it. Almost the whole class read it many times, and nobody had any idea what it's talking about. Most people are just BSing it. And were in AP Lit, we're supposed to know what we're doing. But, some people would argue we aren't his audience, and he's only writing for the people extremely into literature and who would be able to understand and appreciate this nonsense. I understand we're there coming from. Anyways, I have read this thing so many times and the only thing I can get from it is tragedy applies to everyone (the common man) and not just kings and rich people. I think he then goes on to back explain why.
In class we watched a TED talk by Alain de Botton about measuring success and failure. If I had to boil down his whole talk into sentence, it would be this: Other people shouldn't define your achievements as successful or not, only what you think should matter. For a lot of it, he talks about what is defined as a success or a failure. He talks some about not letting other people decide for you, but he also talks about the flip side of don't judge other people so harshly. People often think that if they do something great, it was because of them, but they also think if they failed, it was there own fault. The problem with this is people judge themselves and other people to hard. Sometimes it is the person fault for failing, but often it's not, and from the outside you really have no idea of the full situation. The reason they didn't succeed in it could have been completely out of their hands. Or, they might have not even failed. Just because it might look like a failure to someone on the outside, the person might have achieved what they were trying and your looking at it the wrong way. He also talks a lot about envy. Did you know the more similar some just one is to you, the more likely you are to envy them. I had never really thought about that, but as soon as he said I knew it was true.
Something very interesting he said was Hamlet loses, but is not a loser. The same thing is in real life to. Just because someone doesn't succeed doesn't make them a complete failure. One reason people liked and like Tragedy is because the characters in them felt human. They weren't some perfect superhero or something, instead they delt with problems normal people had too. When they failed, it made them very relateable. But the point of Tragedies isn't to laugh at the characters mistakes, it's to sympathize with them. We should do that more in real life with people. We should help them out, instead of just thinking of them as failures. Based on what I know about literature and stuff (not much), I think a tragedy is basically a sad story. Nowadays, people use the word to describe and thing that's bad, but I think it used to have more of a specific meaning. They were often plays back then. I think Shakespeare wrote a lot of these. Anyways, they would always end up bad or sad, and people liked them some reason. They liked watching the main character struggle through lots of hardships, and then fail. My guess would be people thought they were relateable, but who knows. After doing a little research, it looks like a tragedy is originally dramatic art form. The first known tragedy is written by Aristotle. After that the Greeks and Romans each had there own forms of tragedies. Eventually they become popular in Britain, and that's when many of the famous ones we still know today were written. Shakespeare is probably the most famous writer, some of his are Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet, Julius Ceaser, and Othello. I mean they must have had a pretty big effect if there making us read them at school even today. Now I'm gonna be honest, I've read all the wikipedia links and still don't understand what makes a tragedy a tragedy. It's often a story where the main character fails or struggles, and there is sadness. But not every sad story is a tragedy. Some websites are saying to qualify the story as a tragedy, the main character has to have a major character flaw that leads to their destruction. So basically they can't just have bad luck, it has to be they're fault. Arthur Millers definition of a modern Tragedy is, "a story becomes tragic when the common man, to gain his dignity, fights against his world and circumstances, despite all odds against him, and loses." The one word his says that really makes it a tragedy and not anything else, is loses. |
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