Holen Yee, Period 7, 11/18/21

 

Holen Yee, Period 7, 11/18/21

Modern Mythology 2022

Literacy & Learning

• Write about your thoughts regarding any of the fiction or non-fiction covered in class.

• Reflect on any new information you have learned in English class by considering how that learning influences your critical perception.

• How is what you’re learning applied to any other classes/the world around you?

For the past few days, we have been reading the play “Oedipus Rex” by Sophocles and learning about the components of Greek tragedy. At first, when reading the play, I was struggling to understand what was happening and where in the story of Oedipus we were. It felt like I was dropped right into the thick of it without being given any direction when people were suddenly pleading with Oedipus to deal with a plague. Only after I read a little further in could I orient myself using the knowledge from previous lessons about Oedipus’s story and realize that we are at the beginning of the point where he starts to search for the murderer of the previous king of Thebes. However, I do feel like it is rather disappointing that the beginning of the play was after Oedipus arrived at Thebes, defeated the Sphinx by solving its riddle, and became king. I thought that the riddle was very clever and I would have liked to see it in the play and not just hear about the event after it has already happened.

In these lessons, I learned that Greek drama has quite a few elements that I did not know of before and which I thought were quite unexpected. For example, Aristotle, in his book Poetics, defines rhythm and harmony as one of the seven characteristics and identifies melody as one of the six component parts of a Greek tragedy. When first hearing of this, I thought, “What does music have to do with plays?”, but I learned soon after that Greek drama originated from ancient Greek hymns, called dithyrambs, being sung in honor of the god Dionysus. I thought that this piece of information was very interesting, since I never would have guessed this myself. I also learned that one of the important points of Greek tragedy is that everyone that comes to watch the play already knows the plot, and come to watch solely to see the characters go through misfortune and watch the dramatic irony unfold. This was a pretty foreign concept to me, since to me, knowing the plot beforehand defeats the purpose of experiencing a story, whether it be reading a book or watching a play. Rereading a book has no point if you already know what is going to happen. But, I think that watching a play that you already know the plot of is a bit different from rereading a book. In a play, you can always appreciate the actors’ acting and the atmosphere that is created, while the only things books have are story, characters, and setting, which don’t change with the rereading.

Learning about Greek tragedies, all that goes into them, and the reasoning behind how they work made me appreciate plays and playwriting more. I thought that it would be pretty simple to do and didn’t realize that there is a lot of thought that goes into making sure that both the performance of the play and the play itself are high quality. This also taught me to be less fixated on the idea that plot is the only thing that matters about a story. I can bring this mindset with me when reading a book, viewing a play, or even watching a TV show and try to pay attention to and appreciate the underappreciated components that go into it.