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Questions 15–20 are based on the passage below.
Surveying paradigmatic works of tragic literature from antiquity to the present alongside the immense and ever-growing body of secondary literature on the subject, the literary critic Terry Eagleton arrived at the pat judgment that not only had no satisfactory definition of tragedy been offered to date, but also that none besides the admittedly vacuous “very sad” could ever be offered. Overly broad definitions, which for all intents and purposes equate the tragic with seriousness, lead invariably to Scylla; overly narrow ones, such as the Renaissance-inspired struggle theory, to Charybdis. Notwithstanding this definitional dilemma, Eagleton’s conclusion, as clear a case of defeatism as any heretofore advanced, leaves much to be desired.
In A Definition of Tragedy, Oscar Mandel, who is decidedly more sanguine than Eagleton on this score, discerns in Aristotle’s De Poetica the rudiments of a substantive definition of the tragic. Following the spirit, albeit not the letter, of Aristotle’s text, Mandel sets forth three requirements for any work to be counted as tragic, the third weighing most heavily in his account. First, it must have a protagonist whom we highly (or at least moderately) esteem. Second, it must show how the protagonist comes to suffer greatly. And, third, it must reveal how the protagonist’s downfall was inevitably but unwittingly brought about by his or her own action. It is plain to see that, of the three requirements, the third (call this the inevitability requirement) is beyond question the most contentious as well as the most dubious. The truth is that the inevitability requirement is entirely too stringent. While it may be a sufficient condition, it is not, Mandel’s assertions notwithstanding, the sine qua non of tragic literature.
One need look no further than Anton Chekhov’s Three Sisters, a quintessential work of modern tragedy, to see why this is so. In a provincial capital quite remote from cosmopolitan Moscow, the well-educated, tireless, but spiritually drained sisters are ground down by the inexorable forces of time and fortune. Their failure to leave for Moscow, the childhood home they yearn for, can be understood as their failure to extricate themselves from the tedious and insufferable life brought on by their workaday habits. This suggests a certain acknowledgment on their part of their powerlessness to defy the hands of fate. In the final analysis, the question of whether the protagonist’s fate is sealed in consequence of tragic action, as in Greek and Renaissance tragic dramas, or of inaction, as with modern tragedies, has very little to do with one of the absolutely essential ingredients of tragic literature. That ingredient, of course, is the profound sense of insurmountable powerlessness that yields an unnameable, implacable feeling expressing alienation from life itself.
Questions 15–20 are based on the passage below.
Surveying paradigmatic works of tragic literature from antiquity to the present alongside the immense and ever-growing body of secondary literature on the subject, the literary critic Terry Eagleton arrived at the pat judgment that not only had no satisfactory definition of tragedy been offered to date, but also that none besides the admittedly vacuous “very sad” could ever be offered. Overly broad definitions, which for all intents and purposes equate the tragic with seriousness, lead invariably to Scylla; overly narrow ones, such as the Renaissance-inspired struggle theory, to Charybdis. Notwithstanding this definitional dilemma, Eagleton’s conclusion, as clear a case of defeatism as any heretofore advanced, leaves much to be desired.
In A Definition of Tragedy, Oscar Mandel, who is decidedly more sanguine than Eagleton on this score, discerns in Aristotle’s De Poetica the rudiments of a substantive definition of the tragic. Following the spirit, albeit not the letter, of Aristotle’s text, Mandel sets forth three requirements for any work to be counted as tragic, the third weighing most heavily in his account. First, it must have a protagonist whom we highly (or at least moderately) esteem. Second, it must show how the protagonist comes to suffer greatly. And, third, it must reveal how the protagonist’s downfall was inevitably but unwittingly brought about by his or her own action. It is plain to see that, of the three requirements, the third (call this the inevitability requirement) is beyond question the most contentious as well as the most dubious. The truth is that the inevitability requirement is entirely too stringent. While it may be a sufficient condition, it is not, Mandel’s assertions notwithstanding, the sine qua non of tragic literature.
One need look no further than Anton Chekhov’s Three Sisters, a quintessential work of modern tragedy, to see why this is so. In a provincial capital quite remote from cosmopolitan Moscow, the well-educated, tireless, but spiritually drained sisters are ground down by the inexorable forces of time and fortune. Their failure to leave for Moscow, the childhood home they yearn for, can be understood as their failure to extricate themselves from the tedious and insufferable life brought on by their workaday habits. This suggests a certain acknowledgment on their part of their powerlessness to defy the hands of fate. In the final analysis, the question of whether the protagonist’s fate is sealed in consequence of tragic action, as in Greek and Renaissance tragic dramas, or of inaction, as with modern tragedies, has very little to do with one of the absolutely essential ingredients of tragic literature. That ingredient, of course, is the profound sense of insurmountable powerlessness that yields an unnameable, implacable feeling expressing alienation from life itself.
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Question : 20
Total: 20
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