Our Western culture is made up in large part of a Greco-Roman (humanist)tradition and of a Judeo-Christian tradition. Thus, what we see on television as tragedy-turned-comic has its roots in ancient experiences. The stories we watch on television have become narrative sustenance or substitute stories with a new dimention: they occur in, as it is experienced, an eternal present rather than in the past (having at the most le petit recit) and they have a tragic person mainly in relative geographical proximity, but with the illusion that he or she is far away and that I (the individual viewer) am insulated from the tragic event. The tragic becomes comedy because we experience no purge in the Aristotelian sense, we know that we are mistaken, and we seem to become dependent on mass media in order to reassure ourselves that we live in a comic frame of acceptance; it is others who live in a tragic frame of acceptance.

I know that Burke's Burke's frames are not designed to produce "truth" in some empirical sense, but I wonder if in applying them if something like "untruth" or "less truth" can be one of the effects. The tragic/comic frames seem to apply mainly to agents; those who have agency and, more importantly in this case, intention. Intention is interpreted in two major ways: as well-intentioned but rhetorically "mistaken" or self-serving and rhetorically savvy. In an attempt to understand these frames better, been applying Burke's tragicomic frames to a number of "texts" I've encountered this week. The first is the ongoing "text" of the Brittany Spears saga. In this case, I'm positing the popular media as the agent. The tragic frame might suggest that the popular media is exploiting Spears to sell magazines (quite successfully).

According to Burke, the tragic and comic both warn against the dangers of pride (41). When used in literature they both lead a person (the audience) to a lesson of humility. I'm having a difficult time articulating the differences beteween them at this point, but perhaps by looking at the comic, which Burke sees as more useful, I will understand how it differs from the tragic.

If we think of the tragic and the comic as others have asserted, that is, as frames of seeing, then we can consider that both the tragic and the comic can be frames of seeing the same subject. In the chapter titled "comic correctives," Burke asserts that "the comic frame of reference...opens up a whole new field for social criticism, since the overly materialistic {emphasis his} coordinates of the polemical-debunking frame have unintentionally blinded us to the full operation of 'alienating' processes" (167).

The tragic and comic frames of acceptance are “attitudes” or “motives” that assume the implications of the genres of tragedy and comedy, respectively. The tragic frame is marked by “patterns of fatality, magnification, and humility” (37) and proposes one’s resignation to a sense of one’s limitations (39). The comic frame “warns against the dangers of crime,” (41) proposing the idea that “people are necessarily mistaken” (41), teaching us the same lesson the tragic frame offers us: “the lesson of humility” (41). While tragedy deals with “the cosmic man” (42) and is inhuman, comedy deals with “man in society” (42) and is “essentially humane (42).

It appears that Burke is using the terms “tragic” and “comic” as frameworks for “coding” how people have historically formed cooperatives. They are, I think, “frames of acceptance” or the “organized system of meanings by which a thinking man gauges the historical situation and adopts a role with relation to it” (5). They seem to be “codes” for reading history which highlight “both friendly and unfriendly forces” working to promote cooperation and “fix attitudes that prepare for combat” (20). By “combat” I think Burke means the historical developments leading to how people develop an acceptance to, or rejection of, fixed attitudes within a historical period (like how “market law” came to replace “natural law” (154)).

Comedy and tragedy are poetic categories that occur in drama, but are examined by Burke not so much as a way of getting at drama as it was enacted by Shakespeare, but to provide a framework by which we could examine human ways of seeing things. Burke contends that it is valuable to examine these categories because "each of the great poetic forms stresses its own peculiar way of building the mental equipment (meanings, attitudes, character) by which one handles the significant factors of his time" (ATH 34).