I’ve got a few email questions regarding the paper, and seen a few works in progress, that suggests many of you are working on this “near the deadline.” Let me provide you some resources that can help you wherever you are in the paper process. This is all stuff from the class notes over the last month, reassembled for you in one place.
Paper Requirements
The paper should be 7 to 10 pages (say 1700 to 3000 words).
The paper needs to explore and define catharsis, drawing on the resources listed below. The discussion of catharsis should be about a page, and should reference at least Curran and Aristotle. Essentially, Curran lays out six different senses of catharsis. You need to pick or modify one, and compare it to some others.
I have also indicated that, in addition to catharsis, you should use one of the other terms from our collaborative handbook.
The paper should then close read 2-4 scenes from the game that help me understand the answer to one (or more) of the following questions:
- Is this game a tragedy (by Aristotelian standards)?
- Did you have a cathartic experience?
- How/does the interactive nature of the game augment/diminish its potential as a tragedy capable of producing catharsis?
- Explore the complex relationship to the game’s protagonist / argue for the agent of the tragic action etc (think of the range of work we saw in the project presentations!)
Your answer(s) to that/those question(s) is your thesis. The paragraphs examining scenes are your evidence in support.
Finally–remember that this is mostly advisory. Meaning–you have to show me you can read several academic sources and define catharsis–but, after that, what you do in the paper is up to you. Make it smart. Point to specific elements, scenes, choices, dialogue in the game. But the exact argument of the paper is up to you.
Catharsis Resources
Here’s what I have:
- My Opening Lecture
- My selections from Aristotle’s Poetics (from the Butcher)
- Link to free/complete Aristotle’s Poetics
- Curran, 2016, (PDF in Canvas)
- Link to Meakin
- Link to heuristic, terms
- Pötzsch and Waszkiewicz, Life Is Bleak (in Particular for Women Who Exert Power and Try to Change the World): The Poetics and Politics of Life Is Strange.
Aristotle’s Definition of Tragedy:
VI.2-3
Tragedy, then, is an imitation of an action that is serious, complete, and of a certain magnitude; in language embellished with each kind of artistic ornament, the several kinds being found in separate parts of the play; in the form of action, not of narrative; through pity and fear effecting the proper purgation of emotions.
Here is my blog post on catharsis, which you can quote and argue against in your paper:
I’ll say that I don’t think the purpose of tragedy is to release fear or pity. That’s too narrow. Both in the sense that I don’t think tragic exploration limits itself to what we fear and who we pity (for suffering what seems injust or caprice whims of fate).
Catharsis reaches out to us and reminds us, rekindles, relights, what is already there. Our fear of death. Our fear of loss. Our struggle to find meaning in our lives. Our desire for a soulmate. The pain of rejection or betrayal. Catharsis is a term for the resonance between what we see on the stage, the screen, the page, and our own troubles. This isn’t to say we can’t have a powerful sympathetic response to a narrative to which we have no lived correlate–I find Eli Weisel’s Night to be incredibly powerful despite the fact that I have not experienced genocide. Night is doing powerful work, I would simply insist that it is not cathartic work, because there is no resonance for me. This does not mean it is not “pedagogic” instructive–it certainly aims to teach us how (not) to live. But there is no movement, connection to my life (and, without falling into the “universal” rabbit hole, etc. etc).
So, if I had to lay down a fundamental first principle for catharsis, it would be that there must be a fundamental identification between the action of the tragedy and the audience/reader/player.
