Teaching Tragedy Through Dante and Aristotle in Times of Loss

The author begins with a teacher’s question: how should educators respond to tragedy, both in the lives of students who have experienced loss and in the literature they teach? They point to a news article from years ago in which two Georgia literature teachers described their approaches after a mass shooting. One kept her classroom as a refuge from the outside world, while the other handled current events head on but with evidence and care. The author finds that the article presents only these two options and wonders whether either truly dealt with the heartbreak students face.

The post then turns personal. Early in their career, the author learned that a teacher should decide in advance how to respond to difficult situations, and that lesson later applied to tragedy itself. When a student died in a car crash during the author’s second year of teaching, the author could offer only limited comfort, giving students time to share memories. The author admits that training helps but does not make such moments easy, since teachers are not trained counselors. Still, the author suggests that teachers of literature know tragedy well, and that this knowledge may point toward part of the answer.

Drawing on Dante and Gene Edward Veith, the author explains that Dante called his work a comedy because it moves from suffering toward a hopeful ending in eternity, while a tragedy, in his view, describes a life with some joy but no hope beyond it. The author contrasts this with twentieth-century tragedies such as Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman, whose characters seem to lack any sense of purpose or eternal perspective.

Finally, the author turns to Aristotle’s Poetics, emphasizing that tragedy concerns action and the whole work as a spectacle, not just a checklist of traits. Quoting Louise Cowan, the post argues that tragedies must be seen as works of art that are not literal reflections of daily life. The author concludes that seeing a person in pain should deepen our sense of human dignity, endurance, and shared suffering, and that Aristotle’s distinctions should not be oversimplified.

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