Tragic Drama Research Articles

Staying-at-Home with Tragedy: Self-expansion Through Narratives Promotes Positive Coping with Identity Threat.

The COVID-19 pandemic created a historic opportunity to study the link between identity threat and individuals’ temporary expansion of the boundaries of the self (TEBOTS) through stories. Concurrently, the relationship between eudaimonic entertainment processes and self-expansion, particularly feeling moved and self-awareness, was examined. A quasi-experiment was conducted with an online sample (N = 172) that was randomly assigned to watch either a tragic drama or comedy. Results showed that key TEBOTS predictions were largely confirmed for boundary expansion and the outcomes of narrative engagement and entertainment gratifications. Although identity threat was negatively associated with positive coping with the pandemic, this relationship turned positive when mediated by boundary expansion. Further, exposure to tragedy raised feelings of “being moved,” which, in turn, was linked to self-perceptual depth and expanded boundaries of the self downstream. The present findings suggest that self-expansion through story consumption could benefit viewers’ positive reframing of challenging life experiences.

Reading the troubling case of Leni Riefenstahl through aesthetic and feminist lenses

ABSTRACT Leni Riefenstahl was one of the most talented and one of the most notorious women of the twentieth century. Her gift as a filmmaker secured her a place in the history of cinema. She put this gift to the service of the Nazis. Throughout her life, she steadfastly defended her identity as an artist who merely documented events in Nazi Germany. However, she was unable to escape dominant representations of her in Germany as a woman of evil who seduced the nation into following Hitler to catastrophe. In this article, I offer a reading of Riefenstahl through aesthetic and feminist lenses in international relations. In relation to narratives on Riefenstahl as instrumental in the rise of German fascism and also her self-representation as a political naïf and misunderstood artist, I make the case that she is a more ambiguous figure. Contra representations of Riefenstahl as a monster, I argue that she is better understood as serving as a scapegoat in a tragic drama on the fall of the German nation and its eventual redemption. I conclude with some final reflections on how Riefenstahl’s case speaks to debates on aesthetics, narrative, agency, and accountability in international relations.

Sobre a recepção canibal de uma tragédia perdida

São apresentados, neste artigo, alguns momentos de como se deu o processo de composição da tragédia Penteu, em três recortes narrativos: misto de vivências pessoais, de uma certa arqueologia filológica e do engajamento no teatro contemporâneo de viés antropofágico. Esta tragédia foi gestada em colaboração com o grupo extensionista “Teatro das Ideias Vivas”, da Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro. Penteu é uma recepção exuzíaca da tragédia homônima de Ésquilo, perdida. Desta tragédia, restou apenas um verso: μηδ' αἵματος πέμφιγα πρὸς πέδῳ βάλῃς [“Nenhuma gota de sangue caísse sobre o pé”], citado por Galeno. Analisamos o genoma literário desta gota e o alimentamos com questões contemporâneas até gerar um drama trágico em uma inquietante ritualística que mistura elementos da linguagem de Ésquilo e dos ritos sincréticos da cultura do Rio de Janeiro. Utilizamos uma informação preciosa, escrita por Aristófanes de Bizâncio, o gramático, na hipótese de As Bacantes. Ele disse que Eurípides copiou para a composição de sua última tragédia o enredo de Penteu, o drama escrito por Ésquilo em homenagem a Dioniso libertador.

“Beatrice Di Tenda” by Vincenzo Bellini in Line with the Genre and Style Searches of the Italian Musical Theater of the First Half of the XIX Century

The most significant features of the Italian musical theater of the first half of the XIX century are summarized, the synthetic genre nature of which is concentrated in the poetics of the “romantic drama of belcanto” (the term of S. Barkhatova). Its essence and typological qualities are largely determined not only by the era, but also by the mediating position that this genre occupies between the earlier opera-series and the musical drama of the second half of the XIX century, which will later be represented in Verdi. It is established that the transitional nature of belcanto drama determines the variety of its genre names and the lack of stable established terminology. There are definitions such as “historical melodrama”, “opera seriа”, “lyrical tragedy”, “tragic drama” or “melodrama”, etc., each of which, in fact, is a modification of one genre of musical drama. The significant role of V. Bellini in the development of Italian opera of this period and the creative and performing traditions of the art of belcanto is determined. The history of the creation of the opera “Beatrice di Tenda”, its figurative and dramatic specificity, due to the dual genre nature of the work, which was defined as an “opera seriа” and as a “lyrical tragedy”. The poetics of the latter is manifested in the appeal to the historical plot with the specifics of the era and place of action, while the typological features of Italian opera are evident in the dominance of belcanto traditions, number structure, which determined the dramatic performance of Bellini. The origins of the early Italian musical and theatrical tradition go back to the obvious spiritual and moralizing orientation in the development of Beatrice's image, and the musical and rhetorical content of its intonation, which tends to the figures of “ascent” (anabasis) and “circle” associated with the ideal. Perfect, while the characterization of her husband-tyrant Filippo is marked by an appeal to the typological features of the pompous march, a symbol of indivisible brutal power. At the same time, the emphasis on the spiritual and ethical “dominant” in the plot unfolding of the action and image of the protagonist is consistent with the religious pursuits of the Risorgimento era, which sought national unity, including on the basis of spiritual renewal of society

Paradoks Salib: Keindahan Wajah Kemuliaan Allah

An experience of the cross of Jesus Christ in Christian theology brings the sense of paradox. Christ’s death on the cross reflects the fate of humanity within the context of Christian faith. The cross is also seen as a mystery that tells the tragic story of humans who accept their punishment. However, the cross of Jesus Christ also reveals meanings that challenge Christians to find answers in their contemplation of the cross. The cross becomes a stage for human tragic drama, which might also reveal the beauty of death and life. It is the phatos of humanity, for every human being will die, but it is also seen as the tree of life hoped for by every faithful. On the cross is visible God’s self-giving through the love shown by the crucified Christ. God speaks God’s love not only through words, that is, in the teachings of Jesus Christ, but also through Christ’s loving gesture on the cross. The cross of Christ is the culmination of God’s glory and through it, God’s glory is shown in the beauty of divine love.

JUSTICE: THE DIALECTIC UNITY OF COMEDY AND TRAGEDY

Modern culture is organized by the idea of rationalization which extinguishes the feeling of the tragic life that represent not only tragedy as a literary genre or an aesthetical category, but also the insolubility of conflict between the good ones, the contradiction and conflict in regard to the essence of life, the unexplainable arbitrariness of factual circumstances, devastating potential of passions. This very fact shows that tragedy cannot be seen solely as a means of entertainment or a literary genre. If tragedy as an aesthetical category is the artistic expression of tragic experience, it can only be understood in a cultural context that underlies experience. Tragedies are the ethos of human existence. Indeed, ancient tragic dramas are based on the metaphysical suppostion that conflict, contradiction, arbitrariness and uncertainity is implict to both the structue of human beings and to the whole universe

The Rhetoric of Wounds in Coriolanus; or, a Tragedy of Renaissance Rhetoric

The Rhetoric of Wounds in Coriolanus; or, a Tragedy of Renaissance Rhetoric Jaspreet S. Tambar (bio) It is the sad lot of the tragic hero that he is essentially misunderstood. His pride and failure to engage the vicissitudes of vulgar society and its inclinations to deceit and vice are met with a hard misapprehension of malice in his stubborn resolution to absolute moral clarity. What's more, the tragic hero's pretension, born out of the greatness and simplicity that define his mind, of having comprehended his place and the place of others in the world ensures that tragedy is rife with misinterpretation. Hence the prominent acts of misinterpretation and misrecognition across the history of tragic drama, from Herodotus's story about King Creon having misinterpreted the prophecy of the oracle at Delphi, who told him to his ruin that if he attacked the Persians a great empire would fall; through Brutus's conflation of patrician Republican ideals with popular support; to Wotan's refusal to forfeit the absolute power of the ring despite the warnings of the Rhinemaidens in Wagner's Ring tetralogy. And especially in Coriolanus, a play obsessed with voice and understanding, such misinterpretations serve as a constant source of anxiety, and ultimately tragedy. Shakespeare's Coriolanus is a colossus, imposing in the weight of his stature and the hard finish of his resolutions. As strong as stone and as terse as its plinthed inscriptions, Coriolanus is the living embodiment of Roman virtus, the predicates of which include strength, fidelity, courage, and, most importantly, the Stoic principle of homologia, otherwise known as constancy. The ideal of Roman virtus tends toward uniformity and regularity in action and feeling, like a marble curve. Critics have noted the deep current of Stoicism running through the play, though some have also asserted its absence in the protagonist, arguing that Coriolanus's ostensible constancy is no more than what the Dutch Neo-stoic Justus Lipsius called "obstinacy or frowardness"; or else claiming that Coriolanus's disturbance by public honor and domestic affections proves him to "not have a drop of Stoic blood in his veins."1 Indeed, T.S. Eliot ridiculed Stoic [End Page 27] pretensions in Shakespeare as nothing more than "self-consciousness and self-dramatization."2 In Eliot's post-classical world, pride is opposed to the Christian virtue of humility, and Coriolanus's virtus thus easily reads as obstinacy and arrogance. But his intense regard for constancy, in both the domestic and public spheres, is in fact mistaken by critics for a failure in Stoicism. Nowhere is the play's fascination with the complexities of Stoicism and the hero's remarkable determination to virtus more apparent than in the pivotal scene in the marketplace when theatrical performance threatens Stoic constancy.3 By constancy is usually meant a kind of steadfastness, uniformity, and fidelity. Being constant implies virtue in remaining true to one's self, to be an unmoving rock upon which opinion and influence break like water. Geoffrey Miles argues that constancy is not merely local Roman coloring but the necessary question of the play, that "in a paradox characteristic of this intensely paradoxical play, the passionate traitor Coriolanus is Shakespeare's most self-consciously 'constant' character."4 In both antiquity and the Renaissance there are however two conflicting traditions of constancy, and the near impossibility of negotiating them contributes to Coriolanus's ruin. These conflicting traditions derive from the writings of two major classical authors: Seneca and Cicero. The Senecan ideal celebrates the kind of constancy to which has been referred above, which is primarily reflective and ethical. Seneca says in De constantia sapientis that such constancy is a rational imperative to moral conviction, and its wisdom should be exercised even in the face of tyrants who threaten torture as well as fortune's reversals.5 By contrast, the Ciceronian ideal, which is often described in theatrical metaphors, demands social propriety and thus a public responsibility to act according to a certain part. In the first book of De officiis, a treatise on duty, Cicero decidedly identifies social virtue with moral virtue, each a demonstration of constancy in either action or word.6 For Cicero, propriety is key...

Death's Heads and Death Masks: History as Absence in Juan de la Cueva's Tragedia de los siete infantes de Lara

Whereas modern critics have considered Juan de la Cueva's Tragedia de los siete infantes de Lara (1579) unappealing compared to Lope's 1612 version of the story and discussed the Sevillian playwright's misguided use of classical tragic genre conventions, the present essay proposes a framework for understanding the play that is neither Lopean nor classicist. Arguing that the heart of Infantes is a pervading sense of metaphysical absence, it suggests that the play can be meaningfully construed as an early example of the mourning play, or that mixture of history play and tragedy which the German philosopher-critic Walter Benjamin presented as the central late-Renaissance aesthetic form of historical contemplation in his Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels (1925; The Origin of German Tragic Drama). Cueva's history of the House of Lara can be construed, that is, as a play which is concerned not so much with this or that historical person or event as with—unideal, broken, amputated—history itself.

A alegoria como poética do (ex)combro em Manoel de Barros: uma visada benjaminiana

Walter Benjamin was one of the philosophers who most appropriately discussed the dialectics of history as a movement of extremes, that is, as an impoverished present experience before the glories of the past, which conceals, ironically, another formulation, exposed in the 9th thesis “On the concept of history”: which presents the interpretation of the allegory (ex)put in The Angelus Novus, by Paul Klee, as the “hippocratic facies of history” (Benjamin 1984), thinking this image as “the core of allegorical vision” (ibidem). Manoel de Barros, in his time, dialogues with both Klee and Benjamin, in a movement of (ex)position of episodic scenes/fragments of a nature always in a state of violence, suffering, tedium and death, despite an appearance of exuberance and abundance. In this essay, we propose to discuss/read in Barros’ poetry these poetic-allegorical constructions of nature, especially in the light of The Origin of German Tragic Drama and the thesis IX of Theses on the Philosophy of History by Walter Benjamin (1984 and 1986, respectively), as well as texts by Jeanne Marie Gagnebin (2013) and Michel Löwy (2005) on allegory in the Benjamin’s perspective.

EDİP CANSEVER'İN "KÜLDEN ADAMLAR" ADLI ŞİİRİ ÜZERİNE BİR ÇÖZÜMLEME

listic/Marxist approach. Cansever determines his opinions about life in this perspective and bases his poetry on a concrete ground. The thought is dominant in his poems and he merges lyric and dramatic elements in his poetry. This structure created with lyric-dramatic elements is the poeticization of the tragic condition of human life in the capitalist order. Cansever discusses the hope of surviving and the tragic drama of individuals resisting against the current order and the solitude and alienation problems of individuals identified with the order. The poet who revolts against the order that became systematic and passivities humans places poetry as a handle for hope. Edip Cansever who is one of the Ikinci Yeni (The Second New) Movement mentions the commodification problem emerging with urbanization in his poem “Kul” (Ash) consisting of five parts. Kulden Adamlar (Man of Ash) which is one of the parts where the tragedy of subjects who became passive in the urban life will be examined under the titles of mentality, structure, theme, language, harmony categories in accordance with the method included in “Poem Analysis Theory-Application” by Prof. Dr. Serif Aktas.

Hispanic Baroque Ekphrasis: Góngora, Camargo, Sor Juana by Luis Castellví Laukamp

Reviewed by: Hispanic Baroque Ekphrasis: Góngora, Camargo, Sor Juana by Luis Castellví Laukamp Antonio J. Arraiza-Rivera Luis Castellví Laukamp. Hispanic Baroque Ekphrasis: Góngora, Camargo, Sor Juana. LEGENDA, 2020. 236 PP. HANDSOMELY ILLUSTRATED AND ENGAGINGLY written, the book under review analyzes the role of ekphrasis in Luis de Góngora's Soledades (1613), Hernando Domínguez Camargo's San Ignacio. Poema heroico (1666), and Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz's Primero Sueño (1692). In doing so, Castellví Laukamp seeks to illuminate how criollo authors Camargo and Sor Juana deploy verses of an empathically visual nature to (circum)vent the aesthetic and ideological issues that bound them to their European models and readership (12). In this context, the term ekphrasis encompasses various types of poetic descriptions akin to the rhetorical figure enargeia. The book is less about establishing a typology of unequivocally ekphrastic objects or procedures and more about how and why Góngora, and the writers drawn to his poetics, embed digressive and rhetorically ornate sequences in longer works. This approach to ekphrasis enables the incorporation of ancillary concepts and allusions to works of art to explain the importance of such sequences (10). Chapters 1 and 2 examine scenes where the lovelorn peregrino of the Soledades is prompted by a goatherd and a fisherman to contemplate land and seascapes, respectively. The interplay evidenced in these passages between ekphrasis and teichoschopy, the trope whereby nature is viewed from "a high vantage point" (23), serves a proleptic function and yields an abbreviated vision of totality. In combining these procedures, a sort of paragone or artistic comparison is established: a minute description of nature, using language that evokes painting techniques (ekphrasis), competes with descriptions informed by iconographic conventions aligned with cartography and epic poetry (teichoschopy) (23). As a result, both protagonist and readers of the Soledades have to imagine what lies beyond sight. Nature is thus doubly bracketed, first by the interlocutors who lead the peregrino to see a river view or the seashore and then by the spatiotemporal coordinates that condition each viewing. Each episode becomes an anticipation of things to come in the poem and a metaliterary meditation on the power of language to convey all of nature. San Ignacio. Poema heroico benefits from discussion in chapters 3 and 4. Camargo's overwrought renditions of a sculpted crucified Christ that Ignatius [End Page 163] of Loyola contemplates and the saint's eight-day long ecstatic rapture incited by the image are read as an attempt to navigate the challenges posed by doctrinal compliance, Bloomian anxiety of influence, and the poet's sense of belatedness as a New World author. The result is a poem Castellví Laukamp finds steeped in diglossia, following Walter Benjamin's definition in The Origin of German Tragic Drama (1928): an illustration of the tensions that arise between artistic intent and adherence to Counter-Reformation values (86). Treating Ignatius's ecstasy as "a special category of ekphrasis" (101) convincingly underscores a guiding thread throughout the book: in each of the cases studied, ekphrasis bridges the gap between an unfathomable reality and the perception of that reality by poetic protagonists who remain silent while actively engaged in contemplation. In that sense, Camargo's decision to poeticize the unknown contents of Ignatius's mystical experience, similar to his recreation of an unidentified crucifix, upholds the historicity of both events while delving into stylistic experimentation (95). Chapter 4 explains with great insight why Camargo's treatment of the hagiographical subject sets him apart from his literary predecessors. Sor Juana's most famous silva takes up chapters 5 and 6. The main hypothesis asserts that ekphrasis in her Primero Sueño goes beyond Góngora and Camargo's apposite experiments by trying to render abstract concepts and intellectual constructs (132). The simile in which the soul's fantasía is compared to the legendary lighthouse of Alexandria is read in relation to Hermetic texts, positing a fragment of the thirteenth-century Arabic grimoire Picatrix—disseminated among Neoplatonist and Hermetic circles—as a possible inspiration (146–47). The Egyptian pyramids described in Primero Sueño get a reading richly documented with sources in support of the idea that...

Rethinking the Literary Baroque

Rethinking the Literary Baroque James A. Knapp (bio) John Donne and Baroque Allegory by Hugh Grady. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017. Hardcover $105.00. Hugh Grady’s study of John Donne as a baroque poet takes Walter Benjamin’s early work The Origin of German Tragic Drama as its theoretical jumping-off point. The decision to read Donne and Benjamin together is strategic, as Benjamin the theorist developed at the same time that literary modernists rediscovered John Donne, hailing him as a poet relevant to the uncertainty of the moment in the wake of modernity’s advance in the early twentieth century. Donne’s aesthetic response to the seismic cultural upheavals that defined English culture at the turn of the seventeenth century spoke to the modernist curators of literature, including, most notably T.S. Eliot, Herbert Grierson, and Helen Gardner. The fact that Benjamin, among the most important thinkers of the modernist moment, was exploring seventeenth-century German drama at the same time that the English literary world was granting Donne new life as a poet suited to modernist aesthetics has not been explored in any detail by Donne scholars. Grady’s book seeks to fill that gap. The first chapter provides a long and detailed introduction to the study with two primary goals. First, Grady offers a careful review of the concept of the baroque as a critical, periodizing term. The history is complicated, as the term has never been fully accepted by [End Page 165] literary scholars, including even those comfortable with periodization. Grady recounts the efforts of René Wellek and later Frank Warnke to establish the baroque as a valuable literary critical term defining the shift in poetic sensibility that occurred around the turn of the seventeenth century in England. Borrowed from art history, the baroque referred to the stylistic mode that followed the Renaissance and preceded neoclassicism. Grady admits that the effort to adopt the baroque as the defining poetic mode in early seventeenth-century English literature was never fully successful. The fortunes of the term waned significantly after the advent of deconstruction and poststructuralist theory in the last quarter of the twentieth century. Despite its loss of currency, Grady lobbies for the term’s usefulness, arguing that it helps connect the shift from sixteenth-to seventeenth-century aesthetics to the advent of modernism and postmodernism in the twentieth century. The other primary accomplishment of the first chapter is to track Donne’s fortunes as a poet from the moment of his rediscovery with Eliot and the New Criticism through the era of high theory in the 1970s and 80s and up to the present. The account is lucid and concise, arguing that the New Critical championing of Donne as a poet characterized by “a troubled but usually successful search for aesthetic unity” (14) was the source of Donne’s fall from grace with critics in the aftermath of high theory, which stressed disruption and discontinuity rather than unity. Grady’s argument is that Benjamin’s account of modernist fragmentation not only describes Donne’s aesthetics better than the New Critics’ unity but that this is cause to see Donne’s poetry as speaking to the postmodern moment that is currently unfolding. Like the poets associated with both modernism and postmodernism, Donne was writing at a time when potent historical and cultural changes threatened previously coherent accounts of reality and human progress. Donne’s response was, in Grady’s view, a form of baroque allegory described by Benjamin in the book on German tragedy. Unlike traditional allegory, in Benjamin’s account, the baroque allegorical mode is defined by a difficult juxtaposition of seemingly incompatible fragments that are counterbalanced by a utopian alternative. In the second chapter, Grady turns to the Anniversaries as the paradigmatic examples of Donne’s deployment of baroque allegory in the Benjaminian sense. The argument stresses the fragmentation of the First Anniversary as its strength (a feature of the poem sometimes singled out for [End Page 166] criticism, especially in the era of the New Criticism). The world Donne anatomizes there is a fallen, incoherent world in which correspondence has failed. Only a glimpse of a hopeful alternative is available in the poem...

Deborah and her Sisters: How One Nineteenth-Century Melodrama and a Host of Celebrated Actresses Put Judaism on the World Stage, by Jonathan Hess

Reviewed by: Deborah and her Sisters: How One Nineteenth-Century Melodrama and a Host of Celebrated Actresses Put Judaism on the World Stage by Jonathan Hess Sharon Aronofsky Weltman (bio) Deborah and her Sisters: How One Nineteenth-Century Melodrama and a Host of Celebrated Actresses Put Judaism on the World Stage, by Jonathan Hess; pp. 263. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018, $55.00. Jonathan Hess’s Deborah and her Sisters: How One Nineteenth-Century Melodrama and a Host of Celebrated Actresses Put Judaism on the World Stage tells the amazing story of the block-buster 1849 verse drama Deborah, written by Salomon Hermann Mosenthal. Translated from German into at least fifteen languages, the play was rewritten with major changes by Augustin Daly, the prominent American playwright perhaps best known for Under the Gaslight (1867), which invented the trope of the last-minute rescue of the hero tied to the railroad tracks when the heroine plucks him from the terror of an oncoming train. Daly’s prose melodrama adaptation of Deborah, renamed Leah, the Forsaken, premiered in Boston in 1862, opened in New York in 1863, played for three years in London, and remained wildly popular in several versions internationally for over sixty years. Kate Bateman originated the role of Leah, which became her signature part and made her a transatlantic star. Besides Daly’s hit, Mosenthal’s creation spawned many other offspring, including operas, films, burlesques, epic poems, popular songs published for home performance, and at least two anonymous novels: Leah, the Jewish Maiden (1864) in London and its American knockoff. Hess proves that these iterations of Mosenthal’s tragic drama constitute an important cultural phenomenon with wide-ranging influence. He also argues persuasively that the heroine’s unmerited pain, her justified vengeance, and her ultimate reconciliation generate a heightened emotion that enables Jews and non-Jews to enjoy together, in wildly divergent venues, a transformative “tearful sympathy” for the heroine, a young, virtuous Jewish woman cast off by her gentile lover (27). For Hess this shared [End Page 665] experience provides a vehicle for social and political change. He makes the case not only for the drama’s significance as a literary, cultural, and historical sensation but also for its promoting a “new, secular ethos of liberal compassion able to acknowledge and accommodate Jewish difference” (38). Hess amply documents the drama’s extensive sway, producing firsthand anecdotes describing both “affluent ladies” who pulled out their lace hankies and a “crowded house of sailors” who sat spellbound and in tears (34). These mixed audiences attended repeatedly: George Augustus Sala recorded seeing Bateman at the Adelphi “at least three times a week . . . for the express purpose of weeping bitterly over the woes of the persecuted Hebrew maiden, and of being thrilled by the terrific curse which she uttered” when she realizes she has been cruelly and unjustly abandoned (Sala qtd. in Hess 34). Melodrama rewritings and copies multiplied in the 1860s. Hess discusses Deborah of Steinmark; or Curse and Blessing (1863) in New York; in Baltimore, Miriam, the Deserted (1863); and, in Boston, Clysbia, the Deserted (1864). By 1869, versions of the play were mounted in at least fourteen theaters in New York City alone. So many varieties were performed in the United States that Daly had to print an ad in the New York Herald threatening to prosecute pirated plays like Clysbia and Miriam, including Naomi, the Deserted (1864) and Esther, the Jewish Maiden (1864). In London, a similar explosion followed Bateman’s performance, along with one by the Italian tragedienne Adelaide Ristori in a different adaptation. Shortly thereafter appeared Deborah; or, the Jewish Outcast (1864); Deborah, or the Jewish Maiden’s Wrong! (1864); Rebecca, the Jewish Wanderer (1864); and Ruth, the Jewess (1868). Hess presses home the vast proliferation of Deborah with an abundance of scrupulously documented and entertaining detail. The book is organized into four body chapters. The first focuses on Mosenthal’s play and its initial reception, looking at its effects on audiences through Gotthold Ephraim Lessing’s theories of tragedy, the historical context of the European revolutions of 1848, and the theatrical precursors that present Jewish characters sympathetically. Some of this material will be familiar...

Circles of Failure, Strategies of Hope: A Girardian Perspective on the Tragic Vision

This paper asks whether there are grounds for viewing Girard’s work as a tragic vision, and explores the criteria and contexts that might figure in such an investigation. Mimetic anthropology is built on references to the tragic per- spective, but its tragic aspect is complex and diaphanous in respect of its struc- turing and dynamics. Its framework is difficult to explore without engaging with contemporary Christian theological thought—something that significantly affects its implications. As for the latter, the transformative potential of Girard’s tragic anthropology, directly engendered by its critical approach to its own theses, tends to shatter the stability of its assumptions. Therefore, from the earliest interpreta- tions of ancient tragic drama, through the pitfalls of the notion of sacrifice and the dialogue with the philosophy of existence and dramatic theology, all the way to the so-called apocalyptic phase in Girard’s thought, we can observe shifting relationships between the broadening areas of human failure on the one hand, and the elusive horizon of hope on the other. Within this vision, the last strategy of hope seems to lie in the decision of the individual as a witness to a man-made apocalypse—and/or the apocalypse itself.

Gra żałości – alegoria w barokowym dramacie żałobnym

The article analyses the concept of allegory included in Walter Benjamin’s dissertation The Origin of German Tragic Drama. The main emphasis is placed on the presentation of the allegorical interpretation of signs as a defensive reaction of the subject who is in a state of anomy and identity crisis. The allegory contrasted with the symbol reflects the baroque transformation of salvation history into the Naturgeschichte, the goal-less and deprived of any reference to absolute natural history. In this way, it becomes ideal means of expression for the game of mourning, which brings the melancholic subject out of crisis and helps him to form a new symbolic universe. The article shows the genesis of baroque allegory, its theological context and philosophical implications.

Introduction

Introduction

The Literary Relation to the Other in the Greek Tragic Text

ABSTRACT Following Charles Segal, I argue in this essay that there is an essential textual relation to the Other at the heart of Greek tragic drama. Instead of locating the origin of tragic performance in the being of the poet and poetic truth (á la Nietzsche or Heidegger), I argue that the use of scripts in Greek tragedy indicates an irreducible graphic element of dramatic performance, which I conceptualize in terms of Blanchot's conception of the Oeurve and the impossible relation of writer and reader. The Dionysian element of tragedy, I argue, has an irreducible graphic dimension in the use of scripts and masks. Following this theoretical and historical analysis, I offer several avenues for studying the textuality of Greek tragic drama and the ways that the Greek tragic text turns toward the essence of poetry itself.

Romantyzm jenajski, Cyprian Norwid, Walter Benjamin i Friedrich Creuzer: symbol i alegoria

Comparative studies have established that Cyprian Norwid knew about Friedrich Creuzer’s famous work on the symbol and mythology. He must at least have read its first volume, particularly the theoretical part (albeit in a French translation). Reading Creuzer aided him in reinterpreting his own concept of the symbol, presented in his early theoretical writings. His point of departure were Creuzer’s remarks about “mystical” and “divine” symbols. Norwid’s reinterpretation did not remain without consequences for his poetry. Recently several Norwid scholars have drawn attention to a fresh interpretative context: the concept of allegory elaborated by Walter Benjamin. They considered the context to be related to Benjamin’s and Norwid’s perception of the modern city (Paris from the “Passagenwerk”) and also to the motive of ruins. Benjamin presented his concept of the allegory in his famous book {Origin of German Tragic Drama}. He developed it on the basis of the same considerations about the symbol (focusing in a “totalizing” and “necessary” way on the “mystical now”) and allegory as Norwid once did. Here their paths converge. A precondition, however, for understanding Benjamin’s remarks about the symbol is his PhD thesis {The Concept of Art Criticism in German Romanticism} that devotes much attention to reflexivity in the oeuvre of Novalis and Fr. Schlegel.This “Romanticism of Jena” and its philosophy of consciousness had also impact on Norwid (though mediated by Mickiewicz’s “Parisian Lectures”). Comparing Norwid and Benjamin in these contexts contributes to defining their (differing) attitude towards the temporality of Being and the Holy.

O drama trágico do desdobramento da personalidade em Crime e Castigo


 
 
 O presente estudo interpreta o romance de Dostoiévski, Crime e Castigo, em intercâmbio dialógico com o drama trágico. Defendemos a tese de que a conduta transgressora de Raskólnikov não se fundamenta no ambiente ideológico de seu tempo, mas tem como móbil recôndito a sua personalidade demoníaca, insuflada por desenfreada vontade de potência. O satanismo que o subjuga não irrompe como determinação exterior, mas emerge do profundo desejo de mando e comando, que remonta ao antigo mitologema grego do homem e ao moderno filosofema da subjetividade. Em consonância com a disposição do protagonista, o drama romanesco se concentra, do início ao fim, na representação das emoções trágicas de aflição e terror, suscitadas pelo plano inicial e pela execução final do morticínio. Na representação da cons- ciência trágica de Raskólnikov, Dostoiévski submete a história do romance a uma revolução radical. A sutileza artística da correlação isomórfica do tema da personalidade cindida em polêmica consigo mesma e da forma monodia- lógica da narrativa singulariza o ficcionista russo. Conforme demonstramos, a revolução ficcional do romance em foco não se limita ao monodiálogo originário do drama teatral, sempre recitado pelo personagem na forma pronominal da primeira pessoa, mas também se atesta no monodiálogo especificamente narrativo, expresso na terceira pessoa e caracterizado pela interação da consciência do narrador e da experiência passional do protagonista.
 
 

Um leitor de Walter Benjamin: dialética, interpretação e materialismo em Theodor W. Adorno, 1931-2

O objetivo do artigo é discutir a influência do livro Origem do drama trágico alemão (1928) de Walter Benjamin sobre duas preleções de Theodor W. Adorno na Universidade de Frankfurt, a saber: “A atualidade da filosofia” (1931) e “A ideia de história natural” (1932). Com isso, procurou-se, por um lado, indicar especificamente a influência benjaminiana sobre a ideia de constelação e, por outro, esclarecer as fundações histórico-filosóficas da ideia de história natural, que se encontram no centro das reflexões epistemológicas de Adorno. Dessa maneira, é possível compreender as concepções de dialética, interpretação e materialismo trabalhadas por Adorno com o propósito de caracterizar sua própria tarefa filosófica no início da década de 1930.