modern tragedy literature
English Literature – How would I answer this? Cat on a Hot Tin Roof?
In class we are reading Cat on a Hot Tin Roof and I don’t understand how to go about answering this question.
Okay so this is the question:
In The Sociology of Modern Drama Georg Lukacs defined heroes of new dramatic tragedies as ‘more passive than active’ their heroism one of resisting despair and anguish not of bold aggressive action……a retiring kind of hero a man at the intersection point of great forces and deeds not even his own. Consider the dramatic impact of the character of Brick as a tragic hero in light of these or other statements you have read about a tragic hero.
Brick ain’t the hero of George Lukas’ Star Wars. Notice how he lies around in bed, drinks, bitches at Maggie, and frequently revisits his past. That’s not an action hero. He is a pretty passive character. Does he ever leave the bedroom? TW’s plays center around this sort of morose “hero,” with a botched up past and never happy with himself and never finding happiness.
You could certainly compare Brick with a Harrison Ford type of Star Wars hero–action adventure, or a Shakespearean Hamlet or Macbeth, in which the hero is essentially on glidepath to death.
Slavoj Žižek. Confronting Humanity & The Post-Modern. 2009 1/17
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Death of a Salesman (Penguin Plays) $6.98 Ever since it was first performed in 1949, Death of a Salesman has been recognized as a milestone of the American theater. In the person of Willy Loman, the aging, failing salesman who makes his living riding on a smile and a shoeshine, Arthur Miller redefined the tragic hero as a man whose dreams are at once insupportably vast and dangerously insubstantial. He has given us a figure whose name h… |
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Sophocles I: Oedipus The King, Oedipus at Colonus, Antigone (The Complete Greek Tragedies) $6.48 “These authoritative translations consign all other complete collections to the wastebasket.”—Robert Brustein, The New Republic”This is it. No qualifications. Go out and buy it everybody.”—Kenneth Rexroth, The Nation”The translations deliberately avoid the highly wrought and affectedly poetic; their idiom is contemporary….They have life and speed and suppleness of phrase.”—Times Education … |
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Macbeth (Folger Shakespeare Library) $1.86 Each edition includes: • Freshly edited text based on the best early printed version of the play • Full explanatory notes conveniently placed on pages facing the text of the play • Scene-by-scene plot summaries • A key to famous lines and phrases • An introduction to reading Shakespeare’s language • An essay by an outstanding scholar providing a modern perspecti… |
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Baking Cakes in Kigali (Paperback) $10.84 Gaile Parkin`s stunning debut captures the complex essence of modern-day Rwanda, a nation struggling to recover from unfathomable catastrophe, as seen through the eyes of a cake baker named Angel Tungaraza. Like the country as a whole, Angel is strivin… |
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Shakespeare and the Apocalypse (Hardcover) $106.99 Description not available. |
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Things Fall Apart (Paperback) $13.68 Chinua Achebe`s tragic novel of pre-colonial Igbo society was a major literary and cultural event when it was published in 1958. Written during a period of nationalist assertion and an emerging modern culture in Africa, Things Fall Apart`s… |
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Romantic Tragedies (Hardcover) $87.65 “Troubled politically and personally, Wordsworth and Coleridge turned in 1797 to the London stage. Their tragedies, The Borderers and Osorio, were set in medieval Britain and early modern Spain to avoid the Lord Chamberlain`s censorship. Drury Lane rej… |
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Nietzsche the Birth of Tragedy and Other Writings (Paperback) $14.14 The Birth of Tragedy is one of the seminal philosophical works of the modern period. The theories developed in this relatively short text have had a profound influence on the philosophy, literature, music and politics of the twentieth century. This edi… |