English Literature

English

Students will prepare for their A Level studies by engaging with the concept of tragedy, including the history of the genre from its origins in ancient Greece, through to the renaissance and finally the modern age and materialist tragedy.

Lesson Outline: Three lessons per week

Week 1: Students will look at early definitions and codifications of tragedy and explore what these mean and how they might be applied in relation to well-known plays. We will learn some of the key Greek terms and how to use them, and discuss how tragedy is fundamentally conservative, as it holds that society is perfect and it is the individual who is to blame if things go wrong. We will also look at the differences and similarities between comedy and tragedy, and what it means to have personality flaws.

Key texts:

Oedipus the King, Sophocles Fawlty Towers Great Expectations, Dickens Macbeth, Shakespeare

Week 1: Students will look at renaissance tragedy and the idea that both an individual and wider circumstance are responsible for their fate. We will also look at the way justice operates in society and Marxist categories of texts as either subversive or consolidatory.

Key texts:

Othello, Shakespeare Hamlet, Shakespeare

Week 3: We will look at the modern notion that society conditions and determines people’s behaviour to such an extent that they cannot really be said to be agents of their own destiny. We will look at how history can also be viewed in the Marxist sense, comparing descriptions of Nazi Germany and the Gulf War. We will look at texts which describe the downfall of an individual as a means to criticize the society that is responsible.

Key texts:

Prayer Before Birth, MacNeice I, Daniel Blake, Loach

Week 4: We will look at the compromise position between individual responsibility and environmental determinism in some modern tragedies and discuss whether tragedy remains a vital form, or if it is essentially a lecture on how we should conform.

Key texts:

The Visit, Durrenmatt Death of a Salesman, Miller

Project Outcome: An essay that summarises developments in tragedy over the last 2000 years.

OR

An essay that examines one particular tragic text.

OR

A podcast entitled AN INTRODUCTION TO TRAGEDY involving readings and expert sources.