a. Agamemnon (House of Atreus) tells us that men must learn from suffering.
* Antigone and Creon is the story of House of Thebes.
* Oedipus the King tells how fate effects people and we can't escape from it.
* Medea tells how women grow their consciousness of Feminism.
b. Due to pity and fear, we would feel sorry for the characters, especially the tragic hero. They just have some tragic flaw.
c. Satan used to be an arch angel in the heaven. However, because of hubris, he led the fallen angels and gave rise to a rebellion. Therefore, God grabbed him furiously and threw him to the bottom of Inferno, then Satan's wings got frozen in hell.
d. Aristotle's famous work-- Poetics
He used classical unities in settings (including time and places). As for the antecedents, he would use flashback to describe.
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B. Term Explanation
a. Chorus-- (be spectators) It is a non-individualised group of performers in the plays of classical Greece, who comment with a collective voice on the dramatic action. The chorus consisted of between 12 and 50 players, who variously danced, sang or spoke their lines in unison and sometimes wore masks.
b. Dramatic Irony-- The audiences know better story than the author, so they go there to see how an author planned the theme, setting, and plots. This type of irony is the device of giving the spectator an item of information that at least one of the characters in the narrative is unaware of
c. Tragedy-- It is a form of drama based on human suffering that invokes in its audience an accompanying catharsis or pleasure in the viewing. Tragic plots were most often based upon myths from the oral traditions of archaic epics.
d. Tragic Hero-- A hero of a tragedy must evoke in the audience a sense of pity or fear. In other words, the focus of the tragic hero should not be in the loss of his prosperity.
e. Tragic Flaw (Harmartia)-- It is most often associated with Greek tragedy. In tragedy, hamartia is the protagonist’s error or flaw that leads to a chain of plot actions culminating in a reversal from his/her good fortune to bad. What qualifies as the error or flaw can include an error resulting from ignorance, an error of judgement, a flaw in character, or sin.
f. Hubris (Pride)-- It means extreme pride or self-confidence. Hubris often indicates a loss of contact with reality and an overestimation of one's own competence, accomplishments or capabilities, especially when the person exhibiting it is in a position of power.
g. Catharsis-- It is the purification of emotions—especially pity and fear—through art or any extreme change in emotion that results in renewal and restoration. It is a metaphor originally used by Aristotle in the Poetics to describe the effects of tragedy on the spectator.
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C. Book Discussion
a. Euripides' works are always so modern and much more close to us such as he used anarchy to express the themes. e.g. The Argo were crowded with heroes who were heading to find Golden fleece. -- on P.742
The Argob. Medea left her father and brothers because of her love to Jason. Also, she was a woman who own special powers and capability which foreshadowed that she will kill many people later in the play.
-- on P.744
* unconvincing strategy-- deus ex machina
c. Quotation: -- on P.747
"Who isn't?
Are you just now learning this, that each man loves himself more than his neighbor?
If their father doesn't cherish them, because he's more preoccupied with his own bed."
* Learning here is to get informed instead of studying something.
* "His own bed" refers to the King of Cornith.
d. On Page 748, it expresses not only how grief and furious Medea was, but also her impotent because she tried so hard already.
e. Quotation: -- on P.780
"To this land of Sisyphus I bequeath
a holy festival, a ritual
to expiate in times to come this most
unholy slaughter."
* Sisyphus was a notorious traitor, punished in the underworld for his deceitfulness by having to push a rock eternally up a hill, never managing to get it to the top without its rolling back down.
Sisyphus' punishmentf. Quotation: -- on P.781 (last paragraph)
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D. Vocabulary
a. arch-- It is the same as order. <=> anarchy
b. detest-- extremely hate something
c. petrified-- sort of like horrified
d. foul language-- bad words
e. exile-- "Ex" stands for out.
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