For Monday: Poole, Tragedy, Chapters 4 & 5

As before, read the next two chapters and answer TWO of the following questions in a "thinking out loud" manner. Remember that I'm not fishing for answers or looking for a specific response. I simply want to see how you respond to the readings and where your ideas will take you--and the class, when we discuss them.

Q1: On page 59, Poole writes that "Tragedy represents the conflict not of right against wrong--which is melodrama or simply justice--but of right against right." What do you think he means by this, and how might tragedy reconcile the "dangerous" aspects of philosophy with the more practical, particular aspects of theater? 

Q2: Aristotle championed the idea of a hero having a "fatal flaw" (hamartia) which caused them to create tragedy unknowingly, through a series of ignorant actions. Why might this ultimately be dramatically disappointing for an audience? Why do we want (or need) our tragedies to show people making decisions willfully, and with all the facts at hand (even if they misinterpret them)? Or in another sense, why is it simply more fun to have knowing heroes? 

Q3: Many writers and thinkers, such as Sigmund Freud, believed that tragedy is cathartic because it shows us who we used to be, and who we still are, beneath a cloak of civilization. Or as Poole writes, "tragedy shows us what we are missing" (51). What do they mean by this, and why might tragedy be more a kind of wish-fulfillment than a moral corrective?

Q4: On page 65, Poole suggests that "it is the relation between pain and our ideas about it that tragedy seeks to explore." Why is pain such an important subject for tragedy that has attracted writers such as the Greeks and Shakespeare? How might pain (like ghosts) be a taboo subject that only tragedy can properly deal with? And why is it always the pain of "other people" that interests tragedy?