THE WESTERN HEROIC TRADITION –
PROJECT/PRESENTATION
Western Literature – from Encyclopedia Britannica
Western literature: history of literatures in the languages of the Indo-European family, along
with a small number of other languages whose cultures became closely associated with the West, from
ancient times to the present.
Diverse as they are, European literatures, like European languages, are parts of a
common heritage. Greek, Latin, Germanic, Baltic and Slavic, Celtic, and Romance
languages are all members of the Indo-European family. The common literary heritage
is essentially that originating in ancient Greece and Rome. It was preserved,
transformed, and spread by Christianity and thus transmitted to the vernacular
languages of the European Continent, the Western Hemisphere, and other regions that
were settled by Europeans. To the present day, this body of writing displays a unity in
its main features that sets it apart from the literatures of the rest of the world. Such
common characteristics are considered here.
Ancient literature
The stark fact about ancient Western literature is that the greater part of it has
perished. Some of it had been forgotten before it was possible to commit it to writing;
fire, war, and the ravages of time have robbed posterity of most of the rest; and the
restitutions that archaeologists and paleographers achieve from time to time are small.
Yet surviving writings in Greek and far more in Latin have included those that on
ancient testimony marked the heights reached by the creative imagination and intellect
of the ancient world.
Five ancient civilizations—Babylon and Assyria, Egypt, Greece, Rome, and the culture
of the Israelites in Palestine—each came into contact with one or more of the others.
The two most ancient, Assyrian-Babylonia, with its broken clay tablets, and Egypt, with
its rotted papyrus rolls, make no direct literary signal to the modern age;
yet Babylon produced the first full code of laws and two epics of archetypal myth, which
came to be echoed and re-echoed in distant lands, and Egypt’s mystical intuition of a
supernatural world caught the imagination of the Greeks and Romans. Hebrew culture
exerted its greatest literary influence on the West because of the place held by its early
writings as the Old Testament of the Christian Bible; and this literature profoundly
influenced Western consciousness through translation from about the time of St.
Augustine onward into every vernacular language as well as into Latin. Until then,
Judaism’s concentrated spirituality set it apart from the Greek and Roman world.
Though influenced by the religious myths of Mesopotamia, Asia Minor, and
Egypt, Greek literature has no direct literary ancestry and appears self-originated.
Roman writers looked to Greek precept for themes, treatment, and choice of verse and
meter. Rome eventually passed the torch on to the early Middle Ages, by which time
Greek had been subsumed under a wholly Latin tradition and was only rediscovered in
its own right at the Renaissance—the “classical” tradition afterward becoming a threat
to natural literary development, particularly when certain critics of the 17th century
began to insist that the subjects and style of contemporary writing should conform with
those employed by Greece and Rome.
All of the chief kinds of literature—epic, tragedy, comedy, lyric, satire,
history, biography, and prose narrative—were established by the Greeks and Romans,
and later developments have for the most part been secondary extensions. The
Greek epic of Homer was the model for the Latin of Virgil; the lyric fragments
of Alcaeus and Sappho were echoed in the work of Catullus and Ovid; the history of
Thucydides was succeeded by that of Livy and Tacitus; but the tragedy of the great
Athenians of the 5th century BC had no worthy counterpart in Roman Seneca nor had
the philosophical writings of Plato and Aristotle in those of any ancient Roman, for the
practical Romans were not philosophers. Whereas Greek writers excelled in
abstraction, the Romans had an unusually concrete vision and, as their art of
portraiture shows, were intensely interested in human individuality.
In sum, the work of these writers and others and perhaps especially that of Greek
authors expresses the imaginative and moral temper of Western man. It has helped to
create his values and to hand on a tradition to distant generations. Homer’s epics
extend their concern from the right treatment of strangers to behavior in situations of
deep involvement among rival heroes, their foes, and the overseeing gods; the tragedies
of Aeschylus and Sophocles are a sublime expression of man’s breakthrough into moral
awareness of his situation. Among Roman authors an elevated Stoicism stressing the
sense of duty is common to many, from Naevius, Ennius, and Cato to Virgil, Horace,
and Seneca. A human ideal is to be seen in the savage satire of Juvenal and in
Anacreon’s songs of love and wine, as it is in the philosophical thought of Plato and
Aristotle. It is given voice by a chorus of Sophocles, “Wonders are many, but none is
more wonderful than man, the power that crosses the white sea. . . .” The human ideal
held up in Greek and Latin literature, formed after civilization had emerged from
earlier centuries of barbarism, was to be transformed, before the ancient world came to
its close, into the spiritual ideal of Judeo-Christianity, whose writers foreshadowed
medieval literature.
Source:
“Western Literature”. Encyclopedia Britannica. 5 January 2015. Web. 2015.
The Tragic Hero According to Aristotle
Aristotle claims that "A man doesn't become a hero until he can see the root of his own
downfall."
An Aristotelian tragic hero must possess specific characteristics, five of which are below:
1) Flaw or error of judgment (hamartia) Note the role of justice and/or revenge in the
judgments.
2) A reversal of fortune (peripeteia) brought about because of the hero's error in judgment.
3) The discovery or recognition that the reversal was brought about by the hero's own
actions (anagnorisis)
4) Excessive Pride (hubris)
5) The character's fate must be greater than deserved.
Initially, the tragic hero should be neither better nor worse morally than normal people, in
order to allow the audience to identify with them. This also introduces pity, which is crucial in
tragedy; if the hero was perfect we would be outraged with their fate or not care especially
because of their ideological superiority. If the hero was imperfect or evil, then the audience
would feel that he had gotten what he deserved. It is important to strike a balance in the
hero's character. Eventually the Aristotelian tragic hero dies a tragic death, having fallen
from great heights and having made an irreversible mistake. The hero must courageously
accept death/fate with honor.
Other common traits:
Hero must suffer more than he deserves
Hero must be doomed from the start, but bears no responsibility for possessing his flaw
Hero must understand his doom, as well as the fact that his fate was discovered by his own
actions
Hero's story should arouse fear and empathy
Hero must be physically or spiritually wounded by his experiences, often resulting in his
death
Hero must be intelligent so he may learn from his mistakes
Hero must be faced with a serious decision regarding his flaw
Hero must be noble in nature but imperfect so that the audience can see themselves in him
Hero must discover his fate by his own actions, not by outside forces acting on him
THE WESTERN HEROIC TRADITION –
PROJECT/PRESENTATION
Presentation Rules
3-4 group members; equal responsibility in researching, crafting, and presenting the lesson
(10 minutes; you will lose points for each minute over or under)
Each group must determine which aspect of western literature to pursue for this project. You will be
incorporating the following within your lesson:
Your knowledge of the western literary tradition: archetypal elements, language tools and structure
Your knowledge of Oedipus Rex, Things Fall Apart, and one other western classic that works for your
presentation
Your knowledge of literary analysis and understanding of postcolonial criticism (see below)
New researched information about the specific guiding topic of your presentation (suggestions below)
Complete works cited including the play, the novel, another western classic, and a minimum of 2 articles
for support from online sources or literary journals
(hard copy due in class the day you present; electronic copy due to www.turnitin.com – 10 PM the night
before the first presentation – see syllabus for dates)
Possible Guiding Topics
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Settings– Greek city-states, Umuofia, the village/town, the city, the forest, the sea, the desert, the
home, the ship, the battlefront, the meadow, the river, etc. All connotations with place: physical
descriptions, geographical features, historical impact of, cultural implications. Use Oedipus Rex,
Things Fall Apart, and another classic work where setting is key
Culture clash/Western perspectives on Africa (and “the Other”); what is “the Other” in classical
literature? Who is “the Other” in Oedipus Rex? What is “the Other” in contemporary American
society?
Societies falling apart (Yeats’ poem as universal truth) and societies NOT falling apart (the individual
versus society’s evolution) – when is change good/bad, and what are the implications for a traditional
western hero when change occurs? Use OR, TFA, and other classical western work.
Okonkwo/Oedipus/Mystery Hero/Heroine – a close look at the heroes: western tradition of a tragic
hero, cultural definition of hero, psychological implications, societal expectations
History VS Perception/Representation of Fictitious Characters – true or truthful? Consider how
history morphs with legend – what is most important in depicting history and culture?
Sophocles and Achebe: how their lives and cultures influenced their works (and choose one other
mystery author of a classical work)
Women in classical western literature/Achebe’s work – roles, depiction/portrayal, voice, social
commentary, complexity of gender role/significance; use OR, TFA, and other work
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Language analogies in the western tradition: proverbs, allusions, folktales, songs, etc. How does the
variety of language tools infiltrate/add to the works, and what does it ask of the audience/reader?
Use Oedipus Rex, Things Fall Apart, and a mystery contemporary classic as third example
DEFINITION OF POSTCOLONIAL CRITICISM
A type of cultural criticism, postcolonial criticism usually involves the analysis of literary texts
produced in countries and cultures that have come under the control of European colonial powers at
some point in their history. Alternatively, it can refer to the analysis of texts written about colonized
places by writers hailing from the colonizing culture. In Orientalism (1978), Edward Said, a pioneer
of postcolonial criticism and studies, focused on the way in which the colonizing First World has
invented false images and myths of the Third (postcolonial) World—stereotypical images and myths
that have conveniently justified Western exploitation and domination of Eastern and Middle Eastern
cultures and peoples. In the essay "Postcolonial Criticism" (1992), Homi K. Bhabha has shown how
certain cultures (mis)represent other cultures, thereby extending their political and social domination
in the modern world order.
Postcolonial studies, a type of cultural studies, refers more broadly to the study of cultural groups,
practices, and discourses—including but not limited to literary discourses—in the colonized world.
The term postcolonial is usually used broadly to refer to the study of works written at any point after
colonization first occurred in a given country, although it is sometimes used more specifically to refer
to the analysis of texts and other cultural discourses that emerged after the end of the colonial period
(after the success of the liberation and independence movements). Among feminist critics, the
postcolonial perspective has inspired an attempt to recover whole cultures of women heretofore
ignored or marginalized—women who speak not only from colonized places but also from the
colonizing places to which many of them fled.
Postcolonial criticism has been influenced by Marxist thought, by the work of Michel Foucault (whose
theories about the power of discourses have influenced the new historicism), and by deconstruction,
which has challenged not only hierarchical, binary oppositions such as West/East and North/South
but also the notions of superiority associated with the first term of each opposition.
Adapted from The Bedford Glossary of Critical and Literary Terms by Ross Murfin and Supryia M. Ray.
Copyright 1998 by Bedford Books.