Today in class we discussed tragedy and Romantic vs Modern endings. Our objectives today were to distinguish between the absolutism of Romanticism and Modernism complication; and analyze the roots, components, and formula of tragedy. When discussing the idea of a romantic ending to a story there are very definite absolutes. You either have a good ending or a bad ending; a happy or sad story. In the terms of Rip Van Winkle the ending was most pointedly happy . In fact one of the last few lines begins “Happily that was at an end”. Yet, the modernists would say that perspective shapes perception. That its only a happy ending from Rip’s perspective. This could be a sad ending from Rip’s wife’s perspective.
After talking about Rip Van Winkle we discussed what would create a Romantic ending in The Great Gatsby. As a class we said that Gatsby running away with Daisy, Tom getting hit by a bus, and Daisy’s daughter is brought back into the story is happy. After identifying these we found some of the issues that modernist would have with them.
We then transitioned into talking about tragedy. And how it is an homage to the past and often in reference to an ancient Greek art form. The equation for tragedy is TRAGEDY= FALL/TIME meaning the longest fall creates the biggest tragedy. Again there is a dispute between Romantic and Modern tragedy. Romantics would say tragedy is caused by CHARACTER FLAWS and focus on characters of NOBLE birth. While Modernists would say it never relies solely on the individual and they see tragedy in common man. To round out the class Mr. Rivers brought up a slide that we had seen at the beginning of class that instructed us to choose which passage was the most tragic after learning what tragedy really was.
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