{"id":1805,"date":"2025-08-04T03:30:14","date_gmt":"2025-08-04T03:30:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/complit.hku.hk\/?page_id=1805"},"modified":"2026-08-17T11:55:51","modified_gmt":"2026-08-17T11:55:51","slug":"clit2102-the-tragic-imagination-2","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/complit.hku.hk\/index.php\/clit2102-the-tragic-imagination-2\/","title":{"rendered":"CLIT2102: The Tragic Imagination"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>6 Credits| <strong><a href=\"https:\/\/complit.hku.hk\/index.php\/faculty\/profile-pic-harper-1\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Prof. Beth Harper<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n<p>Almost every day, we encounter \u201ctragedies\u201d on television, on the airwaves, in newspapers, and on our Facebook newsfeeds: shootings, civilian war casualties, industrial accidents, natural disasters, the disintegration of democratic regimes. But what does it mean to call something a \u201ctragedy?\u201d Does it require magnitude (e.g., the devastation wrought by a hurricane)? Then it would exclude the possibility of an individual, private tragedy. Does it simply mean \u201csad?\u201d Then it risks becoming banal: is a canceled vacation tragic? We readily name \u201ctragedies,\u201d but we are often at pains to come up with a satisfying definition: we only know that they end badly. This course is an introduction to \u201ctragedy\u201d as both a concept and a literary genre. We will explore representative works of the genre from its glorious flourishing in ancient Greece (Sophocles, Euripides and Aeschylus), through Rome (Seneca) and into the early modern period (Racine, Shakespeare). We shall then look at what happens to tragedy in global modernity in the works of Bertolt Brecht and Arthur Miller. Together, we will interrogate the nature of the tragic. We will consider, for example, tragedy as way to give form to and make sense of trauma and loss. We will also question whether tragedy is collective or individual, and examine the ethical and political questions it raises. These include the ethically fraught position of spectators who bear witness to fictionalized or mediated suffering: does watching a tragedy or looking at pictures of suffering spur us into action or numb us to the misfortune of others? Finally, we will interrogate to what extent tragedy remains relevant today. In addition to the core plays, we will also look at selections from some of the great theorists of tragedy and works of art inspired by tragic themes.<\/p>\n<p>Assessment: 100% coursework.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>6 Credits| Prof. Beth Harper Almost every day, we encounter \u201ctragedies\u201d on television, on the airwaves, in newspapers, and on our Facebook newsfeeds: shootings, civilian war casualties, industrial accidents, natural disasters, the disintegration of democratic regimes. But what does it mean to call something a \u201ctragedy?\u201d Does it require magnitude (e.g., the devastation wrought by &hellip; <\/p>\n<p class=\"link-more\"><a href=\"https:\/\/complit.hku.hk\/index.php\/clit2102-the-tragic-imagination-2\/\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading<span class=\"screen-reader-text\"> &#8220;CLIT2102: The Tragic Imagination&#8221;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-1805","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/complit.hku.hk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/1805","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/complit.hku.hk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/complit.hku.hk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/complit.hku.hk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/complit.hku.hk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1805"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/complit.hku.hk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/1805\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2010,"href":"https:\/\/complit.hku.hk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/1805\/revisions\/2010"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/complit.hku.hk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1805"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}