Tragedy Definitions

Question 0

Hubris

Answer 0

Overwhelming pride or insolence that results in the misfortune of the protagonist to break a moral law, to vainly attempt to transcend human moral limitations, or ignore a divine warning, with calamitous results.

Question 1

Hamartia

Answer 1

It is the error, frailty, mistaken, judgment, or misstep through which the fortunes of the hero of a tragedy are reversed. The error is not necessarily a flaw in character. It can be an unwitting, even unnecessary misstep in doing rather than an error in character. It may be the result of bad judgment, bad character, ignorance, inherited weakness, accident, or any of many other possible causes. It must, however, express itself through a definite action or a definite failure to act.

Question 2

Tragedy

Answer 2

Tragedy is the imitation of an action that is serious and has magnitude, complete in itself; in language with pleasurable accessories, each kind brought in seperately in the work in a dramatic, not in a narrative form; with incidents arousing pity and fear, wherewith to accomplish the catharsis of such emotions. The hero is an intermediate kind of personage, a man not pre-eminently just and virtuous whose misfortune is brought upon him not by vice or depravity, but by some error in judgment.