Dates: 29 January to 26 March (excluding 19 March) 

Time: 11am-1pm

Venue: Cork Enterprise Centre 7/8, Distillery Fields, North Mall, UCC

Fee: €250

Applications Now Closed

Course Overview: 

Why are some sad stories enjoyable? Or, if they are not quite ‘enjoyable’, why else might we need to tell so many of them? These are our central questions for this course as we trace the history of the most perplexingly popular genre of literature ever created, from Tragedy’s beginnings as the first form of theatre in Ancient Greece to its continuing resonance in prestige TV shows like Succession. Simultaneously one of the most diverse and yet recognisable genres, always returning in new forms and yet so often proclaimed a ‘dead’ art, a genre that leaves us in tears and yet is eternally admired, Tragedy is a complex cultural phenomenon that we don’t always understand but will always find relevant. 

The world seems to have decided that works of Tragedy are implicitly ‘better’ or ‘more significant’ works of art: if you went to the amphitheatre in Athens, you watched 3 tragedies for every 1 comedy; if we studied Shakespeare at school, it was Othello or Macbeth instead of The Comedy of Errors; if a film wins an Oscar, it’s probably a miserable one. This traditional elevation of the tragic genre — in academia, school curricula and so often in literary history — seems inexplicable, but it just keeps happening.  

So why do we keep coming back to Tragedy? What features give it its unique and lasting appeal? Can we separate the merely ‘sad’ from the truly ‘Tragic’? How has the genre changed through time, and, just as importantly, how has it remained the same? And, finally, what can we learn from tragic art? We live in an age where the word ‘tragedy’, originally just a type of dramatic writing, has become all-too-familiar in headlines, courtrooms and political inquiries as the only word capable of encapsulating the atrocities and disasters of the 20th and 21st centuries. If a literary genre can teach us how to describe and interpret the history we are living through, can it also teach us how to cope with it? 

This course takes a transhistorical and interdisciplinary approach to its exploration of a monumental artistic category. Course participants can expect a focus not only on the most famous tragic artworks (the Oedipuses, Hamlets and Gatsbys of literary history) but also on those lesser-known but no less important landmarks in the genre (Roman tragedy, Medieval tragedy, 17th-century novels). Encouraging the broadest view of what Tragedy can be, this course will appeal to anyone interested in plays, poems, music, television or cinema, as we traverse media, languages and cultures to discover the elements that make a Tragedy a Tragedy wherever we may find it. As we situate each tragic story in its socio-historical context, participants will also have opportunities to engage with the visual art, architecture, philosophy, literary theory, and religious and political thought of the various periods and civilisations under discussion. If you’ve ever experienced an artwork and said something like, ‘I loved that but I never want to read/watch/hear it again’, then this course is for you. 

Course Content: 

Week 1 — Greece (Is The Word): Ancient Greek Tragedy 

We begin in Attic Greece, charting tragedy’s early development from Homer’s epic poetry to its peak as the theatrical centrepiece of Athenian Festivals of Dionysus. We look closely at plays by Aeschylus and Sophocles, and consider Aristotle’s Poetics as one way of thinking and categorising ‘the tragic’. 

Week 2 — Nothing to Write Rome About: The Reception of Greek Tragedy 

This week explores tragedy’s reception — how texts and theatrical practices influenced later writers — both in and out of Greece. In Euripides’ plays, we see a tragic dramatist playing fast and loose with the conventions of his Athenian predecessors, and in Seneca’s Roman tragedies we encounter new conventions including five-act structures, violent revenge, and the supernatural. 

Week 3 — Knight Club: Medieval Tragedy? 

As tragedy disappears from the stage in the Middle Ages, we find its themes and narrative devices reimagined in the period’s prose and poetry. We discuss what is familiar and what is new about the ‘tragedy’ in two Arthurian texts, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and the Morte D’Arthur, and explore whether ‘Christian tragedy’ is even possible. 

Week 4 — The Good, the Bard and the Ugly: Shakespearean Tragedy 

In the most transformative era of tragic writing since Ancient Greece, Shakespeare was its most transformative playwright. We first consider the contexts of Renaissance theatre, classical revival and chronicle literature from which his plays emerged, before analysing Hamlet as a case study of how Shakespeare shook up the tragic genre. 

Week 5 — Novel-Gazing: The Tragic Novel 

Tragedy has been intertwined with the development of the novel form ever since Aphra Behn published Oroonoko (1688), widely considered the world’s first novel. Looking at novels from different genres and eras — for example, the horror Frankenstein, the social novel Tess of the D’Urbervilles and Jazz Age classic The Great Gatsby — we ask whether there are certain tragic features that unite them all. 

Week 6 — Butterfly Effects: The Tragic Opera 

Tragedy, Nietzsche says, was born from ‘the spirit of music’, and only in opera could true tragic art be restored to its Grecian glory. We examine the influence of tragic narratives on the operatic masterpieces Madama Butterfly and Wagner’s Ring Cycle, while exploring how the expression of tragedy through opera differs from other art forms. 

Week 7 — Controlled Hysteria: 20th-Century Tragedy 

In the century of two world wars and the nuclear bomb, tragedy moved from an abstract artistic concept to something terrifyingly real, and plays by Arthur Miller and Harold Pinter staged their catastrophes in the small private worlds of travelling salesmen, dockworkers, heavy drinkers and the homeless, suggesting that any ordinary life could be touched by tragedy. 

Week 8 — The Freakiest Show: Tragic Television and Cinema 

This final week considers some recent examples of tragic storytelling in film and television such as Parasite and Uncut Gems. We see how new ‘languages’ of direction, cinematography and serialised narrative change an audience’s experience of the tragic, while questioning what tragedy’s function might be in today’s world. 

Course Lecturer : 

Cian Morey holds a BA Hons with Distinction and an MPhil with Distinction in English Literature from the University of Cambridge, where he sat the renowned Tragedy paper. His research has focused largely on 17th century theatre history, practice and theory, with some diversions into Dickens studies, Renaissance sonneteering and the history of criticism. In 2023 he chaired the Cambridge Faculty of English annual Postgraduate Conference. He is also a theatre director (Romeo and Juliet, Aristocrats and more), an award-winning writer of plays and short prose, and an experienced actor (Hamlet, Macbeth and two plays performed in Ancient Greek, among others). 

Entry Requirements:

Applicants must be at least 18 years old at course commencement. 

Contact Details for Further Information: 

Email: shortcourses@ucc.ie  

Please note our refund policy as follows: 

100% refund if student cancels 1 week prior to course commencement, less €50 processing fee.

100% refund if student's course is cancelled due to insufficient numbers.