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Author: K. M. Newton Publisher: Edinburgh University Press ISBN: 0748636749 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 192
Book Description
This book explores modern literature's responses to the tragic. It examines writers from the latter half of the nineteenth century through to the later twentieth century who respond to ideas about tragedy. Although Ibsen has been accused of being responsible for the 'death of tragedy', Ken Newton argues that Ibsen instead generates an anti-tragic perspective that had a major influence on dramatists such as Shaw and Brecht. By contrast, writers such as Hardy and Conrad, influenced by Schopenhauerean pessimism and Darwinism, attempt to modernise the concept of the tragic. Nietzsche's revisionist interpretation of the tragic influenced writers who either take pessimism or the 'Dionysian' commitment to life to an extreme, as in Strindberg and D. H. Lawrence. Different views emerge in the period following the second world war with the 'Theatre of the Absurd' and postmodern anti-foundationalism.
Author: K. M. Newton Publisher: Edinburgh University Press ISBN: 0748636749 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 192
Book Description
This book explores modern literature's responses to the tragic. It examines writers from the latter half of the nineteenth century through to the later twentieth century who respond to ideas about tragedy. Although Ibsen has been accused of being responsible for the 'death of tragedy', Ken Newton argues that Ibsen instead generates an anti-tragic perspective that had a major influence on dramatists such as Shaw and Brecht. By contrast, writers such as Hardy and Conrad, influenced by Schopenhauerean pessimism and Darwinism, attempt to modernise the concept of the tragic. Nietzsche's revisionist interpretation of the tragic influenced writers who either take pessimism or the 'Dionysian' commitment to life to an extreme, as in Strindberg and D. H. Lawrence. Different views emerge in the period following the second world war with the 'Theatre of the Absurd' and postmodern anti-foundationalism.
Author: Manya Lempert Publisher: Cambridge University Press ISBN: 1108853242 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 253
Book Description
This study of tragic fiction in European modernism brings together novelists who espoused, in their view, a Greek vision of tragedy and a Darwinian vision of nature. To their minds, both tragedy and natural history disclosed unwarranted suffering at the center of life. Thomas Hardy, Virginia Woolf, Albert Camus, and Samuel Beckett broke with entrenched philosophical and scientific traditions that sought to exclude chance, undeserved pains from tragedy and evolutionary biology. Tragedy and the Modernist Novel uncovers a temporality central to tragic novels' structure and ethics: that of the moment. These authors made novelistic plot the delivery system for lethal natural and historical forces, and then countered such plot with moments of protest - characters' fleeting dissent against unjustifiable harms.
Author: Miriam Leonard Publisher: Harvard University Press ISBN: 0674743938 Category : Education Languages : en Pages : 221
Book Description
Under the microscope of recent scholarship the universality of Greek tragedy has started to fade, as particularities of Athenian culture have come into focus. Miriam Leonard contests the idea of the death of tragedy and argues powerfully for the continued vitality and viability of Greek tragic theater in the central debates of contemporary culture.
Author: Edwin Wong Publisher: FriesenPress ISBN: 1525537555 Category : Drama Languages : en Pages : 363
Book Description
WHEN YOU LEAST EXPECT IT, BIRNAM WOOD COMES TO DUNSINANE HILL The Risk Theatre Model of Tragedy presents a profoundly original theory of drama that speaks to modern audiences living in an increasingly volatile world driven by artificial intelligence, gene editing, globalization, and mutual assured destruction ideologies. Tragedy, according to risk theatre, puts us face to face with the unexpected implications of our actions by simulating the profound impact of highly improbable events. In this book, classicist Edwin Wong shows how tragedy imitates reality: heroes, by taking inordinate risks, trigger devastating low-probability, high-consequence outcomes. Such a theatre forces audiences to ask themselves a most timely question---what happens when the perfect bet goes wrong? Not only does Wong reinterpret classic tragedies from Aeschylus to O’Neill through the risk theatre lens, he also invites dramatists to create tomorrow’s theatre. As the world becomes increasingly unpredictable, the most compelling dramas will be high-stakes tragedies that dramatize the unintended consequences of today's risk takers who are taking us past the point of no return.
Author: Barbara A. Heavilin Publisher: ISBN: 9781443852418 Category : God in literature Languages : en Pages : 0
Book Description
From an Existential Vacuum to a Tragic Optimism: The Search for Meaning and the Presence of God in Modern Literature employs a new theoretical approach to critical analysis: Victor Franklâ (TM)s logotherapy (from the Greek â oelogosâ for word or reason and often related to divine wisdom), a unique form of existentialism. On the basis of his observations of the power of human endurance and transcendence â " the discovery of meaning even in the midst of harrowing circumstances â " Frankl diagnoses the malaise of the current age as an â oeexistential vacuum, â a sense of meaninglessness. He suggests that a panacea for this malaise may be found in creativity, love, and moral choice â " even when faced with suffering or death. He affirms that human beings may transcend this vacuum, discover meaning â " or even ultimate meaning to be found in Ultimate Being, or God â " and live with a sense of â oetragic optimism.â This book observes both the current ageâ (TM)s â oeexistential vacuumâ â " a malaise of emptiness and meaninglessness â " and its longing for meaning and God as reflected in three genres: poetry, novel, and fantasy. Part I, â oeReflections of God in the Poetic Vision, â addresses â oetragic optimismâ â " hope when there seems to be no reason for hope â " in poems by William Butler Yeats, T. S. Eliot, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and Gerard Manley Hopkins. Part II, â oeAmerican Angst: Emptiness and Possibility in John Steinbeckâ (TM)s Major Novels, â presents a study of Steinbeckâ (TM)s The Grapes of Wrath, East of Eden, and The Winter of Our Discontent â " novels that together form a uniquely American epic trilogy. Together these novels tell the story of a nationâ (TM)s avarice, corruption, and betrayal offset by magnanimity, heroism, and hospitality. Set against the backdrop of Franklâ (TM)s ways of finding meaning and fulfillment â " all obliquely implying the felt presence of God â " the characters are representative Every Americans, in whose lives are reflected a nationâ (TM)s worst vices and best hopes. Part III, â oeA Tragic Optimism: The Triumph of Good in the Fantasy Worlds of Tolkien, Lewis, and Rowling, â defines fantasy and science fiction as mirrors with which to view reality. J. R. R. Tolkienâ (TM)s The Lord of the Rings, C. S. Lewisâ (TM)s That Hideous Strength, and J. K. Rowlingâ (TM)s Harry Potter series are considered in the light of Franklâ (TM)s logotherapy â " providing paths to meaning and the ultimate meaning to be found in God. In a postmodern, fragmented age, these works affirm a continuing vision of God (often through His felt absence) and, also, a most human yearning for meaning even when there seems to be none â " providing, as Frankl maintains, â oea tragic optimism.â
Author: Annamaria Cascetta Publisher: Anthem Press ISBN: 1783081619 Category : Drama Languages : en Pages : 264
Book Description
The idea of the tragic has permeated Western culture for millennia, and has been expressed theatrically since the time of the ancient Greeks. However, it was in the Europe of the twentieth century – one of the most violent periods of human history – that the tragic form significantly developed. ‘Modern European Tragedy’ examines the consciousness of this era, drawing a picture of the development of the tragic through an in-depth analysis of some of the twentieth century’s most outstanding texts.
Author: Rowan Williams Publisher: Oxford University Press ISBN: 019873641X Category : History Languages : en Pages : 177
Book Description
The Literary Agenda is a series of short polemical monographs about the importance of literature and of reading in the wider world and about the state of literary education inside schools and universities. The category of "the literary" has always been contentious. What is clear, however, is how increasingly it is dismissed or is unrecognized as a way of thinking or an arena for thought. It is sceptically challenged from within, for example, by the sometimes rival claims of cultural history, contextualized explanation, or media studies. It is shaken from without by even greater pressures: by economic exigency and the severe social attitudes that can follow from it; by technological change that may leave the traditional forms of serious human communication looking merely antiquated. For just these reasons this is the right time for renewal, to start reinvigorated work into the meaning and value of literary reading. This short but thought-provoking volume asks the question, "What is it that tragedy makes us know?" The focus is on tragedy as a mode of representing the experience of radical suffering, pain, or loss, a mode of narrative through which we come to know certain things about ourselves and our world--about its fragility and ours. Through a mixture of historical discussion and close reading of a number of dramatic texts--from Sophocles to Sarah Kane--the book addresses a wide range of debates: how tragedy is defined, whether there is such a thing as "absolute tragedy," various modern attempts to rework the classical heritage and the relation of comedy to tragedy. There is also a fresh discussion of whether religious--particularly Christian--discourse is inimical to the tragic and of the necessary tension between tragic narrative and certain kinds of political as well as religious rhetoric. Rowan Williams argues that tragic drama both articulates failure and frailty and, in affirming the possibility of narrating the story of traumatic loss, refuses to settle for passivity, resignation, or despair. In this sense, it still shows the trace of its ritual and religious roots. And in challenging two-dimensional models of society, power, humanity and human knowing, it remains an intrinsic part of any fully humanist culture.
Author: Joshua Billings Publisher: Princeton University Press ISBN: 0691176361 Category : Philosophy Languages : en Pages : 279
Book Description
Why did Greek tragedy and "the tragic" come to be seen as essential to conceptions of modernity? And how has this belief affected modern understandings of Greek drama? In Genealogy of the Tragic, Joshua Billings answers these and related questions by tracing the emergence of the modern theory of the tragic, which was first developed around 1800 by thinkers associated with German Idealism. The book argues that the idea of the tragic arose in response to a new consciousness of history in the late eighteenth century, which spurred theorists to see Greek tragedy as both a unique, historically remote form and a timeless literary genre full of meaning for the present. The book offers a new interpretation of the theories of Schiller, Schelling, Hegel, Hölderlin, and others, as mediations between these historicizing and universalizing impulses, and shows the roots of their approaches in earlier discussions of Greek tragedy in Germany, France, and England. By examining eighteenth-century readings of tragedy and the interactions between idealist thinkers in detail, Genealogy of the Tragic offers the most comprehensive historical account of the tragic to date, as well as the fullest explanation of why and how the idea was used to make sense of modernity. The book argues that idealist theories remain fundamental to contemporary interpretations of Greek tragedy, and calls for a renewed engagement with philosophical questions in criticism of tragedy.
Author: Charis Charalampous Publisher: Routledge ISBN: 1317584201 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 180
Book Description
This book explores a neglected feature of intellectual history and literature in the early modern period: the ways in which the body was theorized and represented as an intelligent cognitive agent, with desires, appetites, and understandings independent of the mind. It considers the works of early modern physicians, thinkers, and literary writers who explored the phenomenon of the independent and intelligent body. Charalampous rethinks the origin of dualism that is commonly associated with Descartes, uncovering hitherto unknown lines of reception regarding a form of dualism that understands the body as capable of performing complicated forms of cognition independently of the mind. The study examines the consequences of this way of thinking about the body for contemporary philosophy, theology, and medicine, opening up new vistas of thought against which to reassess perceptions of what literature can be thought and felt to do. Sifting and assessing this evidence sheds new light on a range of historical and literary issues relating to the treatment, perception, and representation of the human body. This book examines the notion of the thinking body across a wide range of genres, topics, and authors, including Montaigne’s Essays, Spenser’s allegorical poetry, Donne’s metaphysical poetry, tragic dramaturgy, Shakespeare, and Milton’s epic poetry and shorter poems. It will be essential for those studying early modern literature, cognition, and the body.
Author: K. M. Newton
Author: K. M. Newton
Author: Manya Lempert
Author: Miriam Leonard
Author: Raymond Williams
Author: Edwin Wong
Author: Barbara A. Heavilin
Author: Annamaria Cascetta
Author: Rowan Williams
Author: Joshua Billings
Author: Charis Charalampous