Erik (Magneto) chooses between rage and serenity
Catharsis is the purging of emotions, particularly negative ones, and is the best bit of tragedy. Although no one seems certain of its function, I like to think of it as giving us a brief moment, when our emotions have been emptied, where we can see everything clearly and thus glean a rare moment of insight into things that concern us most.
So yeah, my most memorable books are the ones that have made me cry. Unfortunately I rarely ever find myself moved enough to do so, which makes it easy to count them on one hand. Putting a name to them, they are George's Marvellous Medicine by Roald Dahl, Memoirs of a Dangerous Alien by Maggie Prince and The Time Traveller's Wife by Audrey Niffenegger. Harry Potter did make me weep a little when McGonagall shouted "Hogwarts is threatened! Man the boundaries, protect us, do your duty to the school!" but it certainly can't compare to the trio of books above.
McGonagall awakens the defences of Hogwarts
Honestly i'm not too sure what can be said about the relationship between those three books other than the fact they're kinda speculative fiction in taking concepts traditionally associated with science and using it to inform our human relationships; much like Jean Tay's Everything But The Brain, which I conveniently also happen to love.
One could point out that I was a science student through and through the O and A levels who happened to study literature simultaenously, but when it came to thesis topics, I opted to specialise in national cinema theory with a focus on Singapore rather than anything sci-fi-ish. In fact, that led me to be interested in Chinese literature which is why i'm reading Mo Yan's Life and Death are wearing me out with Tash Aw's Five Star Billionaire waiting in the wings.
However I must confess, as should be obvious from my thesis, that I don't really think of literature as reading books anymore. I see literature as the study of stories that can be textual, auditory or even performative. Curiously enough, Chin Ee if you're reading this, it was Wai Kit (Wee Kiat), a final year Lit major in NTU, who told me to focus on studying film. My senior felt that books and poetry were on their way out and that a fortune was to be made in film studies, so I took as many modules as I could in NUS, dabbling in theatre studies and creative writing along the way.
These shaped me to develop a focus on understanding how stories can affect a person and literature became a way for me to explore how different peoples at different times wrote, thought and acted out their stories. Recently I had the opportunity to do a top ten books list and other than those which made me cry, I realise that the rest stood out in my mind because of their unique story structure. Whether it was Jonathan Stroud's Bartimaeus series which employed footnotes and used multiple perspective successfully, or Douglas Adam's Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy which has a very impressive and convoluted narrative structure, most of my top ten stood out because they told stories in one particular way or another. Mo Yan is fast becoming another one beTo put it differently, I hated Dan Brown not because of his provocative nature but because after the second book, it was all too easy to see his formula for story-telling.
So how does all this link to tragedy? Well I suppose if "happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way" (Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina), then tragedies must be more like to have unconventional and interesting story structures. As speculative fiction tends to explore new subject matter, perhaps it also lends itself easily to developing new structures to convey such subjects. Don't believe me? Why not check out this video:
I'm not sure how any of this is going to help me link literature to my students, but I hope we can work it out together. Also, good luck to the three people behind me who haven't posted yet.
Hi yes, I am reading this, and hi, yes, Wee Kiat would have given you the advice given his love of film. But you are right that there are many texts, not just print, that communicate to us, and telling a good story often requires a good structure. I like stories that make me cry as well as stories that make me laugh - I think they both have the capacity to make me think, though perhaps there is a tendency to gloss over matters when we laugh, which is perhaps your point.
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