If you are fluent in classic Greek, when you hear the word "tragedy" you may think of goat songs since "tragedy" comes from the Greek words that means goat song. Many speculate that this is because goats were the prize of chorus competitions or because choruses performed at goat sacrifices. Contrary to how the word derives, tragedy has such a deeper meaning today. Through the centuries, philosophers, authors, and artists have added to the interpretation of tragedy. Influential people such as Plato, Aristotle, Voltaire, Shakespeare, and Freud have all speculated about and shared their thoughts surrounding tragedies. Today, Wikipedia says tragedy “is a form of drama based on human suffering that invokes an accompanying catharsis or pleasure in audiences.” The part of this definition that attracted me was catharsis. It seems like such a big part of tragedy, yet my English teachers in the past barely covered it. Based on this definition, the determining factor or whether or not a work of art is a tragedy is if it is able to evoke catharsis in the audience. This drew my curiosity for two reasons. One, how does one measure the arbitrary feeling of catharsis in the audience. And two, how is an author or artist able to create catharsis through their art? To answer these questions, it is critical to fully understand the meaning of catharsis. Aristotle was the first to use catharsis when describing tragedies. Catharsis actually comes from the medical term, cathartic, which is anything that quickens your body’s ability to release waste. Aristotle compared what a tragedy does to the mind to what a cathartic does to the body. They both release and cleanse the body of something. In the case of a tragedy, it purges the audience’s mind of thoughts and feelings that may have consumed them earlier and they leave with a clean slate and the sense of a renewed spirit. The idea of creating catharsis to produce a tragedy is quite intriguing and I would like to explore it more in the upcoming weeks by looking at exemplary works of tragedy.
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