SECTION ONE: Primary Concepts:

1. Aristotelian Tragedy: A tragedy is a story about a great person who experiences a fall from fortune to misfortune, called peripeteia in Greek. This is also known as the tragic hero’s downfall.
   • Tragedy results in a catharsis (emotional cleansing) or healing for the audience through their experience of these emotions in response to the suffering of the tragic hero in the drama.
   • This reversal of fortune must be caused by the tragic hero’s hamartia, which is often mistranslated as a character flaw, but is more correctly translated as a mistake (since the original Greek etymology traces back to hamartanein, a sporting term that refers to an archer or spear-thrower missing his target).
2. Tragic Hero: Five Traits
   1. The hero had a noble birth.
   2. Makes a mistake that leads to his downfall, or reversal of fortune. This mistake can be the result of a character flaw or an excess of a positive or negative characteristic.
   3. The hero comes to understand that his downfall was his own fault.
   4. The downfall of the hero must arouse pity and fear in the audience.
   5. The tragic hero, according to Aristotle, must be male.
3. Hubris: Extreme over-confidence, haughtiness or arrogance. Hubris often indicates being out of touch with reality and overestimating one’s own competence or capabilities, especially for people in positions of power. The word was also used to describe actions of those who challenged the gods or their laws, especially in Greek tragedy, resulting in the protagonist’s downfall.
4. Allegory: A work of fiction carrying two levels of meaning:
   1. Surface plot/narrative (literal) –
   2. Symbolic/metaphorical meaning in which everything in story symbolizes something greater

SECTION TWO: Literary Terminology

• Theme: A lesson or truth about life revealed in a story or poem. A theme can be expressed in one or two sentences. It is the message about life or human nature that is the focus of the narrative.
• Foreshadowing: A literary device in which a writer gives an advance hint of what is to come later in the story.
• Moral: The lesson a story teaches.
• Setting: The place and the time frame in which a story takes place.
• Character: One of the people (or animals, gods, aliens, etc.,) in a story.
  • Flat v.s. Round
• Dialogue: The conversations that characters have with one another.
• Mood: The feeling a piece of literature is intended to create in a reader.
• Style: The distinctive way that a writer uses language including such factors as word choice, sentence length, arrangement, complexity, and the use of figurative language and imagery.
• Symbol: Person, place, or thing that represents something beyond itself, most often something concrete or tangible that represents an abstract idea.
• Plot: The action that makes up the story, following a predictable (6-stage) pattern referred to as the plot diagram:
  1. Exposition: The part of the story, usually near the beginning, in which the characters are introduced, the background is explained, and the setting is described.
  2. Conflict: A problem or struggle between two opposing forces in a story. There are four basic conflicts:
     • Person Against Person: A problem between characters.
     • Person Against Self: A problem within a character’s own mind.
     • Person Against Society: A problem between a character and society, school, the law, or a tradition.
     • Person Against Nature: A problem between a character and some element of nature (a blizzard, hurricane, mountain climb, etc.
  3. Rising Action: The central part of the story during which various problems arise after a conflict is introduced.
  4. Climax: The high point in the action of a story.
  5. Falling Action: The action and dialogue following the climax that lead the reader into the story’s end.
  6. Resolution: The part of the story in which the problems are solved and the action comes to a satisfying end.

SECTION THREE: Psychology

• Evil: The exercise of power to intentionally harm (psychologically), hurt (physically), and/or destroy (mortally) and commit crimes against humanity
• Freudian Personality Traits:
  1. Id: The part of the personality reflecting unorganized, instinctual impulses. If unbridled, it seeks immediate gratification of primitive needs.
  2. Ego: The part of the personality corresponding most nearly to the perceived self, the controlling self that holds back the impulsiveness of the id in the effort to delay gratification until it can be found in socially approved ways.
  3. Superego: The part of the personality corresponding most nearly to conscience, controlling through moral scruples rather than by way of social expediency. The superego is said to be an uncompromising and punishing conscience.
•  Social Influence:
  1. Compliance: The person at whom the influence is directed (the target) publicly conforms to the wishes of the influencing source but does not change his or her private beliefs or attitudes. (The child eats the spinach but continues to dislike it.)
  2. Internalization: The target changes his or her beliefs, attitudes, or behaviors because of a genuine belief in the validity of the position advocated by the influencing source. (A middle-aged man gives up smoking after reading – and believing – the surgeon general’s warnings that smoking causes cancer.)
  3. Identification: The target changes his or her beliefs, attitudes, or behaviors in order to resemble an influencing source that is respected or admired. (A high school girl takes up smoking in order to be like a group of older girls she admires.)