Laughter and Tears: Comedy and Tragedy

1.00 credits · Undergraduate

Laughter and tears are not always straightforward. A tale of pride going before a fall can be reassuring to us as well as sad, and a Hollywood romantic comedy can encode a scathing social critique. Offering insight into our ongoing fascination with the extremes of human emotion, this course traces how the twin poles of the comic and tragic have developed through literary history, and how they vary across diverse cultural traditions.