Module Information

To encourage students to develop their knowledge of a key genre within the Western tradition; to begin to explore the rich field of critical theory that has grown up around the genre (thus complementing the first-semester core module EN20020 Literary Theory: Debates and Dialogues); using tragedy as a representative example, to study the interaction of genre and history.

To call a work or an event 'tragic' is often to imply that the magnitude of the suffering involved transcends the everyday, and projects it from history into the timeless, the 'universal'. Tragedy can be seen as a constant, a 'shape' of experience that recurs throughout human time. Yet tragedy can also be seen as contingent, defined by the everyday: the works that we call 'tragedies' or 'tragic' are enormously different, changing in response to the needs and desires of their sponsoring cultures, and 'tragedy' is therefore a name for a terrain of bewildering variety. This module, by focusing on a series of remarkable texts that either identify themselves or demand to be identified as tragedies, encourages you to think about the relation between genre and history, recurrence and change. You will learn about the ways in which a series of great thinkers have conceptualised tragedy, and will explore a wide range of practical experiments in the form by a group of innovative writers. The set texts cover a wide historical span, from Greek tragedy through Shakespearean tragedy to left-wing political drama of the late twentieth-century; and you will consider too the potential of the tragic to migrate across genre-boundaries, in the shape of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein and Joseph Conrad's The Secret Agent, both novels with a continuing and compelling contemporary relevance.