Third Year Hon. Mention: The Comedy of Tragedy in "Good Night, Desdemona" and "Cloud 9"

EN 3191, Comedy. CD: Aida Jordao.

Abstract

Readers were impressed by this essay’s theoretically sophisticated grasp of the sometimes slippery concept of genre with particular emphasis on the ease with which comedy and tragedy may transform one into the other. The essay makes deft use of its primary theoretical sources—Northrop Frye, Suzanne K. Langer, Henri Bergson—and employs those sources to elicit novel readings of the two plays it treats. Readers were particularly struck by the way the essay’s facility with genre theory allowed it to conduct a persuasive defense of the recently much derogated Cloud 9, and to respond effectively to the prevailing readings of Good Night Desdemona. In employing a clearly elucidated theoretical frame to allow readers to see new things in literary texts is what literary criticism should do, and this essay does exactly that.