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Tragedy is a form of drama based on human suffering that invokes in its audience an accompanying catharsis or pleasure in the viewing. While many cultures have developed forms that provoke this paradoxical response, the term tragedy often refers to a specific tradition of drama that has played a unique and important role historically in the self-definition of Western civilization. That tradition has been multiple and discontinuous, yet the term has often been used to invoke a powerful effect of cultural identity and historical continuity—"the Greeks and the Elizabethans, in one cultural form; Hellenes and Christians, in a common activity," as Raymond Williams puts it.
From its obscure origins in the theatre of ancient Greece 2500 years ago, from which there survives only a fraction of the work of Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides, through its singular articulations in the works of Shakespeare, Lope de Vega, Racine, and Schiller, to the more recent naturalistic tragedy of Strindberg, Beckett's modernist meditations on death, loss and suffering, and Müller's postmodernist reworkings of the tragic canon, tragedy has remained an important site of cultural experimentation, negotiation, struggle, and change. A long line of philosophers—which includes Plato, Aristotle, Saint Augustine, Voltaire, Hume, Diderot, Hegel, Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Freud, Benjamin, Camus, Lacan, and Deleuze—have analysed, speculated upon, and criticised the tragic form.
In the wake of Aristotle's Poetics (335 BCE), tragedy has been used to make genre distinctions, whether at the scale of poetry in general (where the tragic divides against epic and lyric) or at the scale of the drama (where tragedy is opposed to comedy). In the modern era, tragedy has also been defined against drama, melodrama, the tragicomic, and epic theatre. Drama, in the narrow sense, cuts across the traditional division between comedy and tragedy in an anti- or a-generic deterritorialization from the mid-19th century onwards. Both Bertolt Brecht and Augusto Boal define their epic theatre projects (non-Aristotelian drama and Theatre of the Oppressed respectively) against models of tragedy. Taxidou, however, reads epic theatre as an incorporation of tragic functions and its treatments of mourning and speculation.
Industry:Literature
Tragicomedy is a literary genre that blends aspects of both tragic and comic forms. Most often seen in dramatic literature, the term can variously describe either a tragic play which contains enough comic elements to lighten the overall mood or, often, a serious play with a happy ending.
Industry:Literature
A treatise is a formal and systematic written discourse on some subject, generally longer and treating it in greater depth than an essay, and more concerned with investigating or exposing the principles of the subject.
Treatises have been written by various philosophers:
Industry:Literature
Tripiṭaka is a Pali word meaning Three Baskets. It is the traditional term used by Buddhist traditions to describe their various canons of scriptures. The expression Three Baskets originally referred to three receptacles containing the scrolls on which the Buddhist scriptures were originally preserved. Hence, the Tripiṭaka traditionally contains three "baskets" of teachings: a Sūtra Piṭaka and an Abhidharma Piṭaka.
Industry:Literature
In literature, the tritagonist is the third most important character of a narrative, after the protagonist and deuteragonist. In Ancient Greek drama, the tritagonist was the third member of the acting troupe.
As a character, a tritagonist may act as the instigator or cause of the sufferings of the protagonist. Despite being the least sympathetic character of the drama, he occasions the situations by which pity and sympathy for the protagonist are excited.:451The part of the tritagonist emerged from earlier forms of two-actor drama. Where two actors only allowed for a principal character and his adversary, moving the part of adversary to a third actor (the tritagonist) allowed for the second actor (the deuteragonist) to play roles as a confidant or aide to the principal character, and thereby elicit greater character depth from the principal character by having the protagonist explain their feelings and motivations to an on-stage listener.:451 As Ancient Greek theatre recitations were partly melodic, the role of the tritagonist would typically go to a performer with a voice in the bass range (as compared to the protagonist as tenor and the deuteragonist as baritone).:172 Cicero, in his Divinatio in Caecilium, reported that the tritagonist (being a role of lesser importance than the protagonist) would often have to subdue his voice if he was naturally stronger than the protagonist.
Notable Ancient Greek actors who worked in this role include the orator Aeschines, who was held by Demosthenes to have been untalented as a tritagonist,:175 and Myniscus, who was tritagonist under the playwright Aeschylus.:195In some forms of Greek theatre, it was traditional for the tritagonist to enter the stage from the left.
Industry:Literature
A literary trope is the use of figurative language -- via word, phrase, or even an image -- for artistic effect such as using a figure of speech. The word trope has also come to be used for describing commonly recurring literary and rhetorical devices, motifs or clichés in creative works. The term trope derives from the Greek τρόπος (tropos), "turn, direction, way", derived from the verb τρέπειν (trepein), "to turn, to direct, to alter, to change". Tropes and their classification were an important field in classical rhetoric, and was taken up again in modern criticism, especially deconstruction. Tropological criticism (not to be confused with Tropological reading, a type of biblical exegesis) is the historical study of tropes, which aims to "define the dominant tropes of an epoch" and to "find those tropes in literary and non-literary texts", an interdisciplinary investigation of whom Michel Foucault was an "important exemplar".
A specialized use is the medieval amplification of texts from the liturgy, such as in the Kyrie Eleison (Kyrie, / magnae Deus potentia, / liberator hominis, / transgressoris mandati, / eleison). The most important example of such a trope is the Quem quaeritis?, an amplification before the Introit of the Easter Sunday service and the source for liturgical drama. This particular practice came to an end with the Tridentine Mass, the unification of the liturgy in 1570 promulgated by Pope Pius V.
Industry:Literature
An unreliable narrator is a narrator, whether in literature, film, or theatre, whose credibility has been seriously compromised. The term was coined in 1961 by Wayne C. Booth in The Rhetoric of Fiction. The narrative mode can be developed for several reasons, sometimes to deceive the reader or audience. Most often unreliable narrators are first-person narrators, but sometimes third-person narrators can also be unreliable.
The nature of the narrator is sometimes immediately clear. For instance, a story may open with the narrator making a plainly false or delusional claim or admitting to being severely mentally ill, or the story itself may have a frame in which the narrator appears as a character, with clues to the character's unreliability. A more dramatic use of the device delays the revelation until near the story's end. This twist ending forces readers to reconsider their point of view and experience of the story. In some cases the narrator's unreliability is never fully revealed but only hinted at, leaving readers to wonder how much the narrator should be trusted and how the story should be interpreted.
An exception is an event that did not or could not happen, told within the fictionalized historical novels, speculative fiction, or clearly delineated dream sequences. Narrators describing them are not considered unreliable.
Industry:Literature
Urban fantasy is a sub-genre of fantasy defined by place; the fantastic narrative has an urban setting. Urban fantasy exists on one side of a spectrum, opposite high fantasy, which is set in an entirely fictitious world. Many urban fantasies are set in contemporary times and contain supernatural elements. However, the stories can take place in historical, modern, or futuristic periods, and the settings may include fictional elements. The prerequisite is that they must be primarily set in a city.
Industry:Literature
Urban fiction, also known as street lit, is a literary genre set, as the name implies, in a city landscape; however, the genre is as much defined by the socio-economic realities and culture of its characters as the urban setting. The tone for urban fiction is usually dark, focusing on the underside of city living. Profanity, sex, and violence are usually explicit, with the writer not shying away from or watering-down the material.
Industry:Literature
A utopia is a community or society possessing highly desirable or perfect qualities. The word was coined by Sir Thomas More in Greek for his 1516 book Utopia, describing a fictional island society in the Atlantic Ocean. The term has been used to describe both intentional communities that attempt to create an ideal society, and imagined societies portrayed in fiction. It has spawned other concepts, most prominently dystopia.
Industry:Literature
