We continued to delve deeper into tragedy this week. With every activity that we do, we are shown a different side of tragedy. Each new angle is interesting, but we also tend to see a reoccurring theme. I’m excited to see how we tie the varying ideas together when we finish this unit with our papers. Reading Oedipus Rex was one of our main focuses this week. The whole time we read this, all I could think about were the similarities to the Shakespeare plays that I have read in the past. As they are all tragedies, I guess this makes sense. They all have a crazy, unimaginable situation that somehow manages to hook you in as a reader. I’m quickly realizing that the more I am exposed to tragedies, the more I like them. Not only did Oedipus Rex remind me of Shakespeare, it also reminded me of the Arthur Miller piece we looked at earlier. Miller talked about flaws in a character, and I was able to see some of his ideas in Oedipus. His obsessive quest to find Laius leads to his failure and unhappiness, which is what Miller would consider the tragedy. I liked being able to connect the two pieces together, I think it really solidified Miller’s thoughts for me. Overall, I hope that our tragedy study continues to hold my attention as it has so far. I enjoy making these connections and putting everything together in this way. This unit has completely shifted my perception of tragedy, which is one of my favorite parts of learning. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oedipus_Rex
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When I heard that our next unit would be focused on tragedy, I expected this week to be much more sad than it was. I believed that we were going to be exploring all sorts of upsetting and horrible texts, but this was not the case. We focused instead on what a tragedy actually is, and that turned out to be very surprising. The first part of the definition is the part that everyone knows: a sad, emotional story. That part wasn’t new; it was the second part of the definition that really shifted my perspective. When digging a little deeper, we learned that a tragedy also comes when the audience enjoys watching the suffering take place. This whole idea blew my mind. How could we enjoy watching other people suffer? As this revelation was so mind boggling for me, of course I wanted to learn more about it. We did two different activities throughout the week that really helped us explore this idea more. The first included taking detailed notes when looking at different websites, and the other had us read an article and discuss it with a partner. After this, we did blog posts for both using the illustrating, authorizing and expanding technique for our responses. I really enjoyed this as it allowed me to organize my thoughts very clearly. We have always been told to expand on our thoughts when writing essays, but these three steps made it much easier than anything we have learned before. I am excited to see where the this tragedy unit will take us as we get closer to the end of the trimester. http://literarydevices.net/tragedy/ |
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April 2017
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