Concept Of Tragedy Research Articles

War der Augsburger Reichstag von 1530 eine Komödie? Zur Verwendung dramentheoretischer Begriffe in den Briefen Luthers und Melanchthons

During the Diet of Augsburg Luther and Melanchthon discussed the political and religious developments in their extensive correspondence between Augsburg and Coburg. Strikingly, they used a complex metaphorical system of terminology, which is otherwise known only from the theory of ancient drama (comedy and tragedy). After explaining the terminology and its significance in its original context of dramatic theory (above all Donatus/Euanthius as the ancient inventor of the theory, but also Melanchthon himself in his commentaries on Terentius), the article analyzes Luther's and Melanchthon's use of the terminology. All in all, the terminology reflects a surprisingly clear view of the expectations of each of the correspondents in the course of events. While Luther uses all the terms of the concept of comedy (which means that he expected a happy ending), Melanchthon seems to organize his expectations around a concept of tragedy (which means that he feared an unhappy ending and did not want to be the tragic hero who makes the crucial mistake that leads to disaster). Only when some hope arises that things might still turn out well, does Melanchthon switch to the terminology of comic theory. From all this we can see that there was a highly developed system of communication, which was derived from the theory of drama and by which the correspondents could precisely express their views about the quality of a single event in the context of a whole course of events. In order to understand Luther's and Melanchthon's views and feelings about what was going on and to judge their behavior, it is indispensable to have a clear understanding of the linguistic and intellectual concepts that were underlying their approach to the world. One of these concepts was the ancient theory of drama.

Debates Surrounding an Approach to African Tragedy

Abstract In the West many critics, like Steiner, believe that tragedy has no future, but there is a lively debate going on about the viability of African tragedy. Critics differ about the best approach to tragedy for Africa. The ‘metaphysical’ critics, like Sofola and Soyinka, believe that a concept of tragedy is possible which fits in with the African world view, and they emphasize the role of the hero. Of the ‘Marxist’ critics, Gurr rejects tragedy completely because it is against progress, but others like Jeyifo and Osofisan argue in favour of a kind of tragedy in which the conflict is not waged between individuals but among social classes or forces.

The Concept of Tragedy in Japanese Drama

Tragedy has long been considered one of the highest achievements of Eur opean civilization, with the works of Aeschylus, Sophocles, Shakespeare, Racine in prominence. Since the genre has such high standing, comparisons with non-European serious theatre are difficult. George Steiner has stated the domi nant idea straightforwardly: All men are aware of tragedy in life. But tragedy as a form of drama is not universal. Oriental art knows violence, grief, and the stroke of natural or contrived disaster; the Japanese theatre is full of ferocity and ceremonial death. But that representation of personal suffering and heroism which we call tragic drama is distinctive of the Western tradition. A comparison of Western tragedy with Noh and Bunraku drama, however, does not lead to such a sraightforward conclusion. I argue that tragedy is a theatrical, not a reading experience and that the most serious plays in the Japanese tradition?the 'Women' plays of Noh and the third-act pieces of Bunraku?focus on heroes who though caught in a difficult situation consciously choose their paths, which lead often to the extreme edges of human suffering.

Shakespeare's Concept of Tragedy: The Bard as Anti-Elizabethan

Shakespeare's Concept of Tragedy: The Bard as Anti-Elizabethan

Tragic Situation and Providential Intervention: The Case For a New Concept of Tragedy in 17th-Century French Theatre

(1985). Tragic Situation and Providential Intervention: The Case For a New Concept of Tragedy in 17th-Century French Theatre. Seventeenth-Century French Studies: Vol. 7, No. 1, pp. 65-73.

Tragic Situation and Providential Intervention: The Case For a New Concept of Tragedy in 17th-Century French Theatre

Tragic Situation and Providential Intervention: The Case For a New Concept of Tragedy in 17th-Century French Theatre

Tragic Vision in Kawabata's "The Master of Go"

At first glance the application of the thoroughly Western dramatic concept of tragedy to an Oriental novel may seem to be critical madness. Both the genres and the traditions are jarringly incongruous: the process may seem a bit like trying to examine a flower with a sword. Yet, unlike most Japanese novels, The Master of Go1 seems to invite examination from the perspective of Western concepts. At its most accessible symbolic level the novel presents the Go match between the old Master, Shusai, and the young challenger, Otake, as the objectification of a conflict between tradition and change in Japanese culture, a change intimately associated with Western ideas. Beyond that, the most fundamental level of that conflict is the confrontation of two completely different ways of understanding the nature of human existence at the moment when one is giving way to the other and while both are still vital enough to sustain the conflict's intensity: on the one hand, the traditional Japanese culture's organic view of human beings as emotional and subjective participants in the integrative process of experiencing a complex universe of which they are a functioning element; on the other hand, a systematic view of human beings as objective observers of the universe, categorizing, systematizing, and controlling their experience of a world from which they try to stand apart. The most obvious precedent for such a confrontation is to be found in the classical Greece of the sixth and fifth centuries B.C., where the same kind of conflict took place between an organic, mythological view of humanity as part of the great cosmic cycle and the systematic view of humanity attempting rational control of its own destiny with the beginnings of theoretical science and the reflexive humanism of the Sophists. There, too, a transition occurred

Tragedy and the sovereignty of God: Christian literary criticism and the concept of tragedy

A Christian approach to literature is easily confused with a theological approach. There are many dangers implicit in such an approach. Sallie McFague TeSelle says the following about theologians who presume to violate the bounds of both theology and literature by attempting literary criticism: “There is no reason to suppose that those trained in theology, or philosophy for that matter, are likely to possess, what is essential to the practice of literary criticism, that ‘sensitiveness of the intelligence’ described by Matthew Arnold as equivalent to conscience in moral matters. A theological training seems to have a disabling effect and has subsequently to be struggled against when literary criticism is the concern.” (TeSelle 1966:4).

King Lear and the Decline of Feudalism

The moral problems that are explored in King Lear can be clarified by viewing them in the context of Shakespeare's history plays and of contemporary social conflicts. Lear and Gloucester share the values of a feudal aristocracy that is threatened by an acquisitive and irreverent bourgeois class; the argument over Lear's train reflects the Tudor monarchs' struggle against maintenance, the right of an aristocrat to keep an armed retinue. The Tudor crisis of the aristocracy had tragic connotations for Shakespeare, and the heroes of his later plays are usually figures of the “old regime.” This is not inconsistent with Marx's concept of tragedy, but Shakespeare's humanism should be recognized as nostalgic rather than forward-looking.

"Mozart and Salieri" and the Concept of Tragedy

"Mozart and Salieri" and the Concept of Tragedy

Calderón's "Los cabellos de Absalón": a reappraisal

Calderon's Los cabellos de Absalon, based on the Biblical story of King David and his eldest son Amnon who rapes his half-sister, Thamar, and who is murdered in consequence by her brother Absalom, has generally been acknowledged as a moving tragedy, but no one has yet made a successful attempt to define its tragic character in any detail or to relate it to Calderon's concept of tragedy in general. In the nineteenth century Shelley acknowledged the pathos of David's predicament, of the loving old father surrounded by hostile and rebellious children.

Buero Vallejo and the Concept of Tragedy

think his work promoted a positive tragic feeling, concepci6n trigica que, aspirando a ser como la velazquena de los bufones o la barojiana de los parias, quiere ocultar en su fondo una delicada piedad y fortalecer nuestra moral, sin necesidad de discursos y moralejas, por su solo impulso conmovedor o suspensivo. En una palabra: de acuerdo con las mais viejas tradiciones del teatro, mi comedia intentaba poseer una virtud catirtica.'

George Eliot's Conception of Tragedy

George Eliot's Conception of Tragedy

George Eliot's Conception of Tragedy

George Eliot's Conception of Tragedy

The Concept of Tragedy in Russian and Soviet Literature

W 7 HAT is tragedy? It is easier to point to it than to define it. Oedipus Rex is tragedy, King Lear is tragedy. Tragedy involves but the kind of suffering that elicits more than pity. It involves disaster, but something more than mere catastrophe. It has a sense of terrible relentlessness and of implacable, unmotivated doom which, says James Joyce, fills one with terror the presence of whatever is and constant in human suffering. Is the story of Job a tragedy, when everything turns out well in the end? Perhaps not. Perhaps, like Dante's poem it is a comedy, which was a comedy, Dante explained, because it began in Hell and ended in Heaven. Nevertheless, both the story of Job and The Divine Comedy are so intent on the most excrutiating agony of the human spirit that it is hard not to think of them as tragic. And it is in the same category that War and Peace, Crime and Punishment, and The Brothers Karamazov belong. They too are full of tragic events that occur in an ultimately untragic context; they too are concerned with what is grave and constant in human suffering, and provoke those final questions which are the inevitable accompaniment of tragedy, questions that attempt to detect some order in a universe in which men suffer constantly and unfairly, questions, that is, about justice and freedom. A recognition of human limitations is implicit in the tragic design: on the one hand, man with

Ibsen's Concept of Tragedy

The extensive commentaries on Ibsen as a writer of tragedy are varied arid, as one might suspect, even contradictory. S. H. Butcher, for example, found Ibsen deficient as a tragic dramatist on nearly all counts. My primary purpose in this essay will be to present Ibsen's concept of tragedy through an analysis of Brand (1866), Ghosts (1881), Rosmersholm (1886), and The Master Builder (1892), with passing attention to Emperor and Galilean (1873), while my secondary purpose will be to determine how successful he was as a writer of tragedy.

The Use of Song in Shakespeare's Tragedies

The Modern student who sets out to gain a clear idea of the concept of tragedy in the age of Shakespeare is dependent on two kinds of sources: those of the living theatre, its playwrights and extant dramas; and the reflections of Elizabethan literary sages concerning the nature of tragedy. The force of humanism in the second half of the sixteenth century was such that ancient precedent pervades both the actual plays and contemporary critical writings. Before proceeding to an examination of Shakespeare's use of song in his mature tragedies, particularly with respect to Othello and Hamlet, I want to consider the role of music in the Elizabethan theatre generally.

The Concept of Tragedy in Modern Criticism

The Concept of Tragedy in Modern Criticism