Near the beginning of the year we also talked about comedy and tragedy novels. Since we began the year reading Albee’s The American Dream we first had to learn about theater of the absurd. In a handout we read how Esslin, the man who invented theater of the absurd, used it as a device to draw attention to the traits of the playwright and have people focus on what he is trying to say through his work. Through his characters and situations he is almost always commented on today’s society and its values and gives his hidden opinion of these matters. It was interesting to learn how theater of the absurd began and how much it has influenced dramas and theater.
On another handout we looked at the theories of humor and comedy. We looked at the six elements for something to be funny and many examples of correctly written comedy. Learning about humor more than finding jokes in a work was very fun and gave me a whole new look at things as we read, annotated and discussed The American Dream, a prime novel of the absurd.
In other handouts in class we turned to the opposite of comedy; tragedy. While talking about tragedy and how something can become tragic, I found that many tragedies were Dystopian and were set in a place less than perfect. Tragedy had many characteristics; the hero is involved and starts from the top and ends at the bottom, rational, sensible and many times ending in mass death. Many of Shakespeare’s tragedies (i.e Hamlet, The Tempest, etc) are good examples to show how a story doesn’t have to have a happy ending.
3 comments:
I think that you have summarized these ideas very well. You hit the main topics that would allow someone to understand what each term is. I think that in order to be able to study from each example you could utilize more specific examples and possibly their application to things that our class has read. That would make studying from this extremely beneficial and almost effortless. An example could be the examples of a well written comedy, or how exactly the American Dream is theater of the absurd.
Here, you do a better job of explaining the topics we learned. It still could use a bit more expalnation to help someone study, but you bring up good points about the theater of the absurd, tragedy, and comedy, enough to help the reader get a basic idea of what they are.
For the most part, I agree with your peers' comments--your definition of Theater of the absurd is unclearly worded, though, Also, American Dream is a play, not a novel =) I'm curious about why you would say that many tragedies are dystopian--I don't really think this is common.
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