1. Journal #1: Dystopia as Tragedy?
Learning Targets:
Students will be able to list common Tragic Flaws of a tragic hero.
Students will be able to identify what makes a character the tragic hero
Students will be aware of Classical Tragedy, catharsis, and Hubris.
Students will be able to defend or argue against Smith’s thesis that dystopian fiction is modern tragedy.
Students will be able to connect these terms to Dystopian Fiction and 1984 to ultimately decide if it fits.

2. Smith’s Thesis
Dystopian Fiction is a modern type of classical Greek tragedy…

3. Discussion: What are the characteristics of Greek Tragedy?
What is Catharsis?
What are the characteristics of a Tragic Hero?
Why do people like tragedy?

4. Why do people like depressing stuff?

5. Classical Tragedy
Tragedy: is a genre of drama based on human suffering that causes catharsis for the audience. Tragedy deals with the themes of love, loss, pride, the abuse of power and the relationships between men and gods.
The hero in a Classical Tragedy is plagued by a tragic flaw that keeps him or her from solving their problem.
The hero will have many opportunities to overcome their flaw but never be able to.
Often involves dramatic irony, as well as other types of irony.

6. Catharsis
Catharsis is when the audience feels intense pity or sadness about the contents or characters of literature and plays that results in the audience feeling happier or refreshed afterword due to the extreme purging of emotions. Aristotle argued that tragedy cleansed the heart through pity and terror, purging us of our petty concerns and worries by making us aware that there can be nobility in suffering. In your own words describe what Catharsis physically feels like.

7. Catharsis
As we read dystopian fiction, notice the similarities in endings of our novels. Are they Cathartic, or trying to be?

8. Tragic Hero
The main character of a Classical Tragedy is the Tragic Hero.

9. Tragic Hero
A character whose fate matters, figuratively (through symbolism) or literally, to a nation or people.
A character who challenges fate; struggles against supernatural forces or doom.
A character who has a tragic flaw
A character who fails in the end; they make choices that bring about their destruction and/or fate prevent success.
A character who develops deeper self-knowledge through suffering.

10. Tragic Hero The character usually goes on a quest.
The character has both good and bad in their personality.
Can be protagonists or antagonists

11. Modern Tragic Hero Modern twists: Society may be oppressor
Does not have to be high born, more often a common man
Can be a woman
May/not result in recognition of tragic flaw
Harsh Punishment: May/not die

12. Common Tragic Flaws (personality flaws)
Hubris: excessive pride or confidence or (for the Greeks going against the gods)
Ambition: the desire to achieve greatness or status
Indecisiveness: failing to make a choice quick enough for fear of being wrong
Misplaced-Trust: the hero trusts the wrong people despite evidence they should not
Lack of Self-control: the character is unable to control their emotions, behavior, reactions, and desires
Lack of Self-Knowledge:
In the novels you’ve read here at SHS, which characters have had these Tragic Flaws?

13. “Never since Greco-Roman antiquity has there been as much Greek drama performed as in the twentieth century.” (Revermann, 3)

14. Martin Revermann’s reasons people like Greek Tragedy:
“The Appeal of Difference”:
Tragedy is a very different form of art than other “subsequent Western theatrical traditions… [and] to many, though not all, non-Western traditions.” (Revermann, 107). Audiences “don’t just latch onto difference—they jump at it.” (Revermann, 109).

15. Martin Revermann’s reasons people like Greek Tragedy:
(2) “The Appeal of Proximity” The culture that created Greek drama is gone: “it’s language, music, rituals are irretrievably gone. But the death of the language and its cultural contexts is a source of new, invigorating, life, or lives rather.” (109).

16. Martin Revermann’s reasons people like Greek Tragedy:
(3) “The Appeal of Bigness” Greek drama was, and still is, a grand spectacle. Additionally, “the bigness of the tragic hero or heroine” is fundamentally appealing (111).

17. Martin Revermann’s reasons people like Greek Tragedy:
(4) “The Appeal of Survival” perhaps the most important appeal of tragedy. “The [destructive] universe of tragic dysfunctionality is not tantamount to wholesome ‘black-holism.’ There are survivors.”

18. Dystopian Fiction, Tragedy?
Do you think, from your experience, that dystopian fiction books are examples of Tragedies? What is the most compelling evidence for and against? Do any of Revermann’s “4 Appeals” apply to dystopian fiction? What about 1984 specifically? 12 Monkeys?

19. One Potential Major Difference
“Tragedy, in other words, is ‘good to think with,’ but not ‘good to act upon’” however classical dystopian texts usually are warnings; so they are intended to be ‘good to act upon’ and ‘good to think with.’ (Revermann, 106).

20. Dystopia as Greek Tragedy?
Revermann’s Conclusion:
Greek tragedy “explores the extremes of human suffering.” Audiences latch on to this because of the suffering humanity went through during the twentieth century: “It saw genocides, the constant threat of nuclear annihilation, totalitarianism of every description, and the conflict of capitalism vs. communism in a variety of hot and cold wars. It saw religious extremism, extreme inequality… significant improvements in terms of gender equality and sexual liberation. And it saw the emergence of an extreme connectedness in a fully globalized world.” (114)
“We, in our historical situation at the beginning of the twenty-first century, are, and will continue to be, the children of an extreme age. We are tragic figures, all of us, in the sense that we have seen and looked into the abyss, collectively, and our own abyss, individually. And we like the tragic chorus, are survivors. It is because of this that we have to feel the appeal of dystopia, and the concomitant desire to invert it.” (114).
Does this apply to dystopian fiction?

21. What about teen Dystopian Fiction sagas, like The Hunger Games?
“Dystopianism turns out to have a natural affinity with American adolescence. And this, I think, is where the life of the genre got squeezed out, like a beetle burned up on an asphalt driveway by a boy wielding a magnifying glass on a sunny day. It sizzles, and then it smokes, and then it just lies there, dead as a bug. The duel of dystopias is nothing so much as yet another place poisoned by polarized politics, a proxy war of imaginary worlds. Dystopia used to be a fiction of resistance; it’s become a fiction of submission, the fiction of an untrusting, lonely, and sullen twenty-first century, the fiction of fake news and infowars, the fiction of helplessness and hopelessness. It cannot imagine a better future, and it doesn’t ask anyone to bother to make one. It nurses grievances and indulges resentments; it doesn’t call for courage; it finds that cowardice suffices. Its only admonition is: Despair more. It appeals to both the left and the right, because, in the end, it requires so little by way of literary, political, or moral imagination, asking only that you enjoy the company of people whose fear of the future aligns comfortably with your own. Left or right, the radical pessimism of an unremitting dystopianism has itself contributed to the unravelling of the liberal state and the weakening of a commitment to political pluralism. “This isn’t a story about war,” El Akkad writes in “American War.” “It’s about ruin.” A story about ruin can be beautiful. Wreckage is romantic. But a politics of ruin is doomed.”

22. Lacie Pound, Tragic Heroine?

23. Lacie Pound, Tragic Herione?
Tragic Hero Trait
Lacie Pound
A character whose fate matters, figuratively, to a nation or people.
A character who challenges fate; struggles against supernatural forces or doom.
A character who has a tragic flaw
A character who fails in the end; they make choices that bring about their destruction and/or fate prevent success.
A character who develops deeper self-knowledge through suffering
The character who usually goes on a quest.
The character has both good and bad in his personality.