Father Bruce Wellems didn't know the dropout statistics when he came to Back of the Yards in 1990 to serve as a parish priest. Born and raised in New Mexico, Wellems initially had only vague notions of what an inner-city ministry might look like and little commitment to the neighborhood's struggling youth. But after some prodding from a local park…

In two very different versions of a story of rum-running along the British Columbia-Alberta border in the Crowsnest Pass in the early 1920s, Sharon Pollock and John Murrell replay history as tragedy. Murrell's libretto for the opera "Filumena" captures the passion and pathos of the exceptional true-life story of a young woman, who at the…

This report is the result of a nationwide survey conducted in March 2008 of student life officers and campus safety directors to assess the impact of the April 2007 shootings at Virginia Tech on campus safety and security policy and practice. Discussion areas include: (1) Student Privacy vs. Need-to-Know; (2) Prevention, Mitigation and Recovery;…

A child must be at least 13 years old before he can begin to understand the effects that a tragedy can have on the lives of others. (CK)

Ponders the effect of September 11th on teenagers. Proposes that reading books can help teenagers sort out complicated issues. Recommends young adult novels that offer hope for overcoming tragedy. Lists 50 short story collections worth reading. (PM)

Thirteen children's books with tragic themes are discussed in this paper. The introductory section offers definitions of tragedy and melodrama and discusses the issue of the appropriateness of tragic themes in children's stories. Six books are then discussed in which child characters must try to deal with the death of a sibling, a parent,…

Considers Greek myth of Oedipus and proposes an Oedipus cycle, in contrast to Freud's Oedipus complex, which represents not the unconscious passions of a small boy, but rather the awareness of the life cycle in the larger context of the succession of the generations and their mutual interdependence. (Author/NB)

This article, reporting on research in progress on the nature of tragedy, falls into three sections. The first explores the concept of awe and relates it to contemporary thinking about spiritual education. The second identifies tragedy as an artistic form that evokes awe in response to the vision of the human condition that it presents. The…

The Theatre of the Grotesque, a dramatic movement in Italy from 1916 until 1930, grew directly out of Pirandello's concept of "umorismo," the painful laugh accompanying the tragic sense of bewilderment at the incongruities and cruelties of life. Growing first of all from a reaction against positivism and its theatrical counterpart,…

Suggests that transactional analysis is a useful tool in providing insight into literary works and in offering a precise vocabulary with which to share observations, and gives a sample analysis of Shakespeare's tragedy "Othello." (JM)

A psychological analysis of the motivations and actions of the characters in Act I, Scene 2, of Shakespeare's King Lear" (RD)

Paper read at the Annual Meeting of the Modern Language Association of America (MLA) in Chicago, Illinois, December 1967. (DS)

Notes that teachers and writers across the country were called upon to share poems and prose that they had turned to in the days following the attacks of September 11, 2001. Notes that the response was a testament to literature's ability to transform experience of events as well as its capacity to be transformed, to be rendered anew by tragedy.…

Presents suggestions for helping children cope with the events of September 11, 2001, including: do more listening than talking; offer opportunities for expressing their feelings through stories, artwork, and play; be calm and optimistic about everyone's safety; and respect some children's self-protective position of being unaware of or…