We read the article "The Tragic Fallacy" by Joseph Krutch, and let me tell you, all I really got from that article is that he needs a new editor. Seriously. Some of the paragraphs were two sentences long because one of those two sentences was half a page in length. Those ranting, run-on sentences basically just made me lose track of where I was in the reading, and that became all I could focus on.
Now, my personal rant aside, things that I liked about "The Tragic Fallacy." I liked when Krutch said that tragedy is not about human suffering, it is about joy and happiness. If you think about it, if you don't know sadness, you don't know joy. Emotions are relative, so your personal happiness is different from another person's and so on and so on. Without misery and heartbreak, we wouldn't know love and we wouldn't know anything good in the world. We need that negative contrast to teach us what the good truly is in the world.
Krutch also said that tragedy deals with faith in human nature. We believe that people are essentially good so when tragedy strikes, it's even more heartbreaking. We sympathize with the characters rather than feeling vindicated that the unfortunate event happened to them.
Krutch pointed out that tragedy focuses on imitating noble actions. Take Oedipus for example. He behaved in an extremely noble way, he cut off ties with his family in order to protect them. However, that wasn't the right course of action in this case because the prophecy he so feared wound up catching up with him. That idea of correct behavior and of noble behavior makes the protagonist's fall from grace even more painful to witness.
Now, my personal rant aside, things that I liked about "The Tragic Fallacy." I liked when Krutch said that tragedy is not about human suffering, it is about joy and happiness. If you think about it, if you don't know sadness, you don't know joy. Emotions are relative, so your personal happiness is different from another person's and so on and so on. Without misery and heartbreak, we wouldn't know love and we wouldn't know anything good in the world. We need that negative contrast to teach us what the good truly is in the world.
Krutch also said that tragedy deals with faith in human nature. We believe that people are essentially good so when tragedy strikes, it's even more heartbreaking. We sympathize with the characters rather than feeling vindicated that the unfortunate event happened to them.
Krutch pointed out that tragedy focuses on imitating noble actions. Take Oedipus for example. He behaved in an extremely noble way, he cut off ties with his family in order to protect them. However, that wasn't the right course of action in this case because the prophecy he so feared wound up catching up with him. That idea of correct behavior and of noble behavior makes the protagonist's fall from grace even more painful to witness.