This year we will be studying two very classical genres of literature: comedy and tragedy. The two are inextricable from one another; they represent two sides of a coin and are deeply related, and sometimes difficult to distinguish.
We will study comedy through your summer reading (as many contemporary memoirs have a distinctly comic point of view), the works of Shakespeare, Voltaire and contemporary writers. In the second half of the year we will shift gears to study tragedy, specifically the anti-hero, a character who has gained a great deal of popularity in modern pop-culture (think Tony Soprano, Walter White and even the Macbeths of the Scottish play). |