Teaching the Tragicomic

In teaching writing, one emphasizes the importance of “angle” or “voice” or “hook” because is at the core of what makes writing good. It is what primes the pump of the rhetorical situation. It informs the piece and inspires both writer and reader. So, it is the form, the shape that words create, that is the telos of writing. A text is sparked by ideas, but they are junior to the order of the words that convey them. This is reflected in our copyright laws which protect the precise relationships of the words in a text, not the ideas they convey. So, if teaching composition is a matter of helping a writer learn to sculpt an idea in words, it follows that understanding how ideas can be dismantled (a tragic matter if the idea is dear or binding) and reconstructed (a comic response that realigns the debris) builds imaginative muscle, the womb of angle and voice.

Gilyard’s comments on West’s tragicomic hope operate on literal and figurative planes to illustrate this. Art it is the comic, healing response to life’s sharp edges; it reworks the steel to make a tool from the weapon. In West’s words, it is African American music - a “sad yet sweet indictment” of the tragic circumstances of oppression - that enables a “melancholic yet ameliorstic stance” in the face of its dispiriting force. Similarly, Susan Jarratt suggests that historians who engage with this bittersweet process can embolden society to do the same. She argues that this tragic exposing and comic exploring was at the heart of Sophistic rhetoric. To learn it opens space for dis-courses - a forging of new paths – which can lead to new understandings of old information. Why else write - why else teach one how to?