Why does it seem like every book I read in English class is a tragedy?

Your teacher is a fan of the Genre. When I was in high school our reading assignments were all Fantasy and Science Fiction.

As your teacher if he or she would consider a different genre? For example, suggest Much Ado About Nothing for the next class assignment. It’s a Shakespearean classic which all right-thinking English teachers know and love, and it’s a comedy with a happy ending.

@All, It’s not just my current teacher, it is my teachers for the past four years. My next book has been chosen in advance (has been for the whole year), and it is also tragic.

Start an Occupy The Campus Library movement? :-p

Wow! Are the English teachers your school suffering from clinical depression maybe? Couldn’t they have at least thrown in some Mark Twain and a few of Shakespeare’s comedies to lighten things up. Sheesh.

@HungryGuy “I’ve been reading tragedies in my English classes for my whole academic life! I AM THE 99%!”
I dunno, maybe it’s just cheaper to get those books.

In late October it’s probably too late to withdraw from the course without taking a hit on your GPA. But maybe you can talk to some of the English teachers in advance of next semester’s registration to find out what books they assign, and choose accordingly.

Yeah, I had the same problem when I was in high school. All we read were depressing books with horrible endings, like:

The Scarlet Letter
Romeo and Juliet
The Crucible
Of Mice and Men

And the list just goes on… we hardly ever read anything remotely happy.

Every story carried to a logical conclusion would be a tragedy. “They lived happily ever after… and then died,” is the ‘proper’ ending to every fairy tale. So every comedy is just a tragedy cut short.

You just happen to be reading “complete” stories. That’s all.

Ask your professor why no Lysistrata, Taming of the Shrew, Moll Flanders, Naked Lunch. Tom Jones, Catch-22, Portnoy’s Complaint? Allo classics.

Just offering a perspective here—in many tragedies, the characters are more developed, three-dimensional and are struggling with some heavy, contrastive emotions. They’re usually also at odds with society and… honestly, over the past 2000 years, people who are at odds with society often end up in a huge mess. Messes are more multilayered than happy stories.

That doesn’t mean that comedies or happy stories don’t have complicated characters facing complicated conflicts, but the tendency is usually that comedies have two-dimensional characters with simple problems. Say, compare Liar Liar with Crash, or Ella Enchanted with The Notebook. Some non-tragedies are multilayered, yes, just the frequency is lower.

Tolstoy said in his tragedy, Anna Karenina: Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. That could be paraphrased to apply to stories.

That being said… I agree that your school’s overlooking many good non-tragedies.

I think the message (conscious or otherwise) is that life is serious and serious literature is the truer form of literature. I don’t agree, but some faculties are composed of all people like that. It’s too bad. Life is also fun and playful along with the seriousness. If humor isn’t part of your curriculum, be sure to find some for yourself! There are a lot of funny classics. Tom Sawyer and Shakespeare’s comedies comes to mind and I’m sure others could add to the list.

People take “serious” art more seriously. It’s the same reason why people think that music written in a minor key is better or more important than music written in a major key. Many of Shakespeare’s comedies would make for a far better reading and learning experience (even if the students didn’t get all of the ribald humor—examples of which can be found in the tragedies, as well). Since a lot of teachers are under the impression that education must always be a SERIOUS BUSINESS, they stick with the “serious art.”