Download A Threshold Concept in the Teaching of Tragedy

Ethical reading:
A Threshold Concept in the Teaching of Tragedy
Christopher Burlinson (Emmanuel College)
Ethics and tragedy
This comes from the work (among others) of the American legal/literary/philosophical
(herself a boundary-straddler, or boundary-disturber) critic Martha Nussbaum. We might
summarize (in extremely brief terms) the ideas surrounding this concept as follows:
 ethics (particularly in its Aristotelian sense) asks what it means to live a good life, a life
of eudaimonia, of goodness and wellbeing. Tragedy tells us that this can be disturbed
or destroyed by things that are beyond our control, by things that happen to us (or that
we do) without our choosing them to happen.
Teacher Perspectives
Tragedy is a compulsory component of Part II English.
We encourage students not to settle on an easy definition of
tragedy, to see that the tragic is something that has been
successively defined and re-defined by different theoreticians and
practitioners.
As the survey below suggests, this can lead to confusion and
bafflement; our response to them tends to be that (at least in their
first term) this bafflement is important, that it since it is a mode of
writing that deals with unanswerable questions, and since there
have been so many different attempts to answer these questions,
that they should feel slightly overwhelmed.
 tragedy, like other literary forms, can pose ethical questions, in a way that other kinds
of philosophical enquiry cannot, since it depicts ethical dilemmas being encountered
and worked through.
 our response to tragic drama or literature, a response that might be strongly
emotional, should itself be analysed as ethical. These emotions are not merely useful
in reaching a response to literature – they can be considered as a valid response in
themselves and don’t need to be transcended or moved beyond. (NB the frequency of
response as a tragic motif – how does a character respond to the suffering of an
other?)
Learner Perspectives
I gave a very short questionnaire to my third-year class in 8th week.
Among the responses were the following:
I asked: Is this a difficult concept to understand? What makes it
difficult to understand?
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Tragedy (like other forms of literature) is radical in that it forces us – as its audience,
readers or critics – to see the world from a point of view that we might customarily ignore.
It particularizes, and forces us to imagine, a point of view that we do not usually imagine:
“thinking outside [ourselves]” in the words of one of my students. In other words, tragedy
is not just about pity, it forces us to pity, to have compassion.
Nussbaum thus wants to rehabilitate emotion as an intellectually valid part of the critical
process; we are encouraged not to see it as something that needs to be superceded by
thought.
She also suggests, further, that we should use this pity/compassion as a basis for a
social emotion – that it can be the basis of justice.
Why a Threshold Concept?
A transformative concept: it suggests that literature is raising the same questions as other
kinds of ethical enquiry. Also, as can be seen above, we might think of pity as
transformative – confronting us with a point of view from which we have never
looked at the world, and making us imagine what it would be like to occupy that
point.
An irreversible concept: since it teaches the student that every response is an ethical
response – as readers, as subjects, we cannot de-ethicize oursleves: to attempt to
do so is implicitly an ethical act.
An integrative concept: it brings together fields of literature, philosophy, also (in
Nussbaum’s work) implications for social policy – emotions can and should be part
of our intellectual and social response to one another.
A bounded concept: it asks us about the boundaries between literary and non-literary
response, between literature and the everyday, between literature and philosophy
A counter-intuitive concept: since one might have been accustomed to think about the
literary response as something detached.
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“a difficulty in both of the terms being very difficult to define”
“there is no correct definition of ‘ethical’ or ‘tragic’”
“both ‘ethical’ and ‘tragic’ are such umbrella terms that
encompass so much theory and definition”
“terms are difficult to define, and difficult to isolate from social
or aesthetic approaches to language.”
“Yes, because it involves the abstraction of a consistent rule
set based on a fundamentally inconsistent genre –
characterized by indeterminacy and desperation to define.”
“Ethics is a difficult concept to define. There isn’t much
language.”
Were there particular approaches you found useful while learning
this concept?
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“concept of how far individual is integrated / separated from
society and ethical choices is useful.”
“I can’t think of particular approaches which were useful,
since they all seemed to become inextricably linked”
“I felt disorientated by many differing and contradictory
approaches”
“Discussing problems with other students helps a lot with
tricky concepts – learning what other people think and
hopefully disagreeing in order to form your own opinion.”
Implications
Students do find this a difficult concept. They are troubled by
the lack of boundaries – that both ethical and tragic are terms
that have changed, and been re-appropriated. They are
troubled by being taken away from their usual critical tools
(“there isn’t much language”). They find it difficult to “isolate”
ethics from other kinds of response – this was gratifying, since
I had hoped to prevent them from feeling that ethics was
something that could be isolated. This, I think, is what makes it
a threshold concept.
The Part II exam, though, allows them to answer without
mentioning any of this. They could, for instance, take a
feminist / post-structuralist approach and still be awarded very
high marks. Ethics – at least in terms of how we assess this
subject in exams – is one direction in which they could take
their thoughts, not a hurdle over which they have to pass to
move to a new stage.
“Transforming Perspectives: Technology to Support Teaching and Learning of Threshold Concepts” is an ESRC/EPSRC
Technology Enhanced Learning Project and is part of the Teaching and Learning Research Programme.
It is directed from the Centre for Applied Research into Educational Technologies by Dr. Patrick Carmichael.
Project Contact: Dr. Naomi Irvine, CARET, 16 Mill Lane, Cambridge, CB2 1SB.
Email: 01223 765362 Project Website: http://www.caret.cam.ac.uk/tel