Today’s Plan:
- Project Two: The Tragedy Paper Expectations
- Tragedy Project Resources
Project Two: The Tragedy Paper Expectations
When we started this project back on February 1st, I promised you 4-5 weeks to complete your game and develop your papers. Today marks the end of week four. The time of writing is upon us. Many of you have done some work already both in your journals and in your presentations. My hope is that ideas are fomenting. It is time to calcify them.
Final papers will be due March 10th. I will respond to papers over the break.
Vitals:
- The paper should be 7 to 10 pages (say 1700 to 3000 words)
- The paper should be written in MLA or APA format with a corresponding Works Cited / Reference List. You should use the OWL MLA or OWL APA websites for formatting.
- The paper needs to develop a definition of catharsis. This should include citing and explaining (the ambiguities) in Aristotle’s definition and explaining at least two of the competing definitions Curran presents. It will likely take you 2 pages (double-spaced) to do this.
- The paper needs to work with one additional term we’ve discussed this project (see resources below). You might have to look up other sources to help develop your understanding of the term (Wikipedia, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, etc). Be sure to include these in your Works Cited / Reference List (check formatting in OWL). It is your job to talk about how/why this term relates to catharsis and then, in the paper, to talk about why that term is specifically important to understanding your experience of that game.
The paper should then close read 2-4 scenes from the game that help me understand the answer to one (or more) of the following questions:
- Is this game a tragedy (by Aristotelian standards)?
- Did you have a cathartic experience?
- How/does the interactive nature of the game augment/diminish its potential as a tragedy capable of producing catharsis?
- Explore the complex relationship to the game’s protagonist / argue for the agent of the tragic action etc (think of the range of work we saw in the project presentations!)
Your answer(s) to that/those question(s) is your thesis. It is the point that your paper is attempting to prove. Make sure your introduction lays the argument out and “road maps” the route the paper will take to get there. The paragraphs examining scenes are your evidence in support.
Finally–remember that this last part is mostly advisory. Meaning–you have to show me you can read several academic sources and define catharsis–the stuff in the first bulleted list is non-negotiable. The stuff in the second bulleted list is offered as potential avenues for analysis. However, what you do in the paper is up to you. I want to read a paper that uses the concept of catharsis and another Greek aesthetic term to say something smart. Point to specific elements, scenes, choices, dialogue in the game. But the exact argument of the paper is up to you: I cannot predict or assure that the questions I lay out above will work for every person’s experience with any given game. They are starting points. If you analyze specific scenes of the game using the theoretical readings we’ve read and discussed in order to reflect on your play and the designer’s intentions, you are ensured at least a B on the paper (see the rubric in Canvas).
Catharsis Resources
Note that there should be .pdfs of all readings in Canvas.
- 2023 Tragedy Workspace Document. This document has a few things of value:
- If you are still unsure of what to write about, then you can look at the heuristic in the document for an expanded list of questions.
- Some initial research material for the other terms with which we worked this semester: Hamarita (the flaw), Aporia (problem, see Meakin–though their definition is a bit reductive), Epiphany (A ha! moment), Peripeteia (the reversal of fortune or the turn).
- My selections from Aristotle’s Poetics (from the Butcher edition, you can find publication info on Amazon)
- Link to free/complete Aristotle’s Poetics
- Curran, 2016, (PDF in Canvas)
- Bate (PDF in Canvas)
- Link to Meakin
Aristotle’s Definition of Tragedy:
VI.2-3
Tragedy, then, is an imitation of an action that is serious, complete, and of a certain magnitude; in language embellished with each kind of artistic ornament, the several kinds being found in separate parts of the play; in the form of action, not of narrative; through pity and fear effecting the proper purgation of emotions.
One more resource. Here is a blog post I wrote on Catharsis last year. You are free to cite this. You are also encouraged to argue against it (should you decide to do so).
Title: “What if Catharsis Wasn’t Merely Fear and Pity?” May 2022.
First, let’s clear up what catharsis might mean, especially the idea that catharsis is a kind of pleasure. We all get that catharsis for Aristotle means that we watch something painful and then (sort of) feel good about it. But why do we feel good about it? How do we flush out the particulars? This is where things get tricky. Let me introduce two/ interpretations–I roll with the second more than the first.
Okay, the first is that we recognize in the protagonist something that plagues ourselves, one of our foibles, weaknesses, flaws. Hence we pity them. Or we see that they are the victims of the bad circumstances and we pity them. And, at the same time, because we identify with them, we fear that we could make the same bad decisions or find ourselves a pawn of a similarly unjust fate.
Perhaps the play resolves itself, and through the play we learn to overcome those bad things, to fix our flaw, to be better. Thus, we are purged, cleansed, of our pity and fear. The pleasure here is tied to the pleasure of learning, of becoming better.
I don’t really buy that model. Rather, I think we reconcile, accept, those flaws. Perhaps we learn the importance of overcoming our flaws, perhaps we are better at avoiding them. But I think catharsis more as a coming to terms with our frailties, learning to live with them, coming to recognize humanity as something over than divine, ideal, or perfect. The rhetorician Kenneth Burke once said that humans are “rotten with perfection,” with the idea of perfection, with creating ideals and then comparing ourselves to them. Judging ourselves lacking for our inability to meet the impossible ideal. I think the cathartic “pleasure” of coming to terms with our frailty is timid, subdued. It is a kind of peace that eschews from a contentment with our/selves.
I’ll also say that I don’t think the purpose of tragedy is to release just fear or pity. That’s feels too narrow to me. Both in the sense that I don’t think tragic exploration limits itself to what we fear and who we pity (for suffering what seems injust or caprice whims of fate).
Catharsis reaches out to us and reminds us, rekindles, relights, what is already there. Our fear of death. Our fear of loss. So, yes, fear is certainly part of us. But what about our struggle to find meaning in our lives? Our desire for a soulmate. Is there a fear that we won’t find meaning or love (we could spin it that way). But rather than fear, what about the frustration love (or its absence, or its betrayal) causes us? The pain of rejection or betrayal. Catharsis is a term for the resonance between what we see on the stage, the screen, the page, and our own troubles, thoughts, feelings. And we can have powerful relationships to characters that do not necessarily amount to only pity.
This isn’t to say we can’t have a powerful sympathetic response to a narrative to which we have no lived correlate– I find Eli Weisel’s Night to be incredibly powerful despite the fact that I have not experienced genocide. Night is doing powerful work; I would simply insist that it is not cathartic work, because there is no personal resonance for me. It operates in the realm of sympathy (feeling for) rather than empathy (feeling with). This does not mean it is not “pedagogic,” i.e., instructive– it certainly aims to teach us how (not) to live. But there is no connection to my life (and, without falling into the “universal” rabbit hole, etc. etc), no identification. I experience it from a distance.
So, if I had to lay down a fundamental first principle for catharsis, it would be that there must be a fundamental identification between the action of the tragedy and the audience/reader/player.
