Tragic Drama Research Articles

Simulation, Violence, and Resistance in Euripides' Helen

Simulation, Violence, and Resistance in Euripides' Helen Brian V. Lush (bio) Helen was in any case merely a simulacrum, since the universal form of beauty is as unreal as gold, the universal form of all commodities. Every universal form is a simulacrum, since it is the simultaneous equivalent of all the others—something it is impossible for any real thing to be. Jean Baudrillard Introduction Euripides' "new Helen," as Aristophanes (Thesm. 850) identifies her, occupies a tenuous position between the aggressive imposition of power (divine, political, and erotic) and resistance. In Hera's replication of Helen, the goddess would nullify Helen's identity in order to remove the stakes of a military conflict predicated upon Helen's singular beauty. Although Helen's eponymous heroine seeks to differentiate herself from her divinely fabricated clone, she nevertheless re-enacts a pattern of abduction, duplicity, and martial violence which has always haunted her story. Paradoxically, her efforts at resistance, both to human coercion and to the threat posed by her double, come to simulate the irony, deception, and seduction that characterize the eidôlon (and, by extension, the prior tradition around Helen that the eidôlon embodies).1 Accordingly, as Jean Baudrillard suggests in the quotation that introduces this essay, Helen's universal mythic embodiment of beauty, seductive allure, and disarming cleverness should give us pause in assigning authenticity or priority to any of her instantiations, since each Helen is always "the simultaneous equivalent of all the others." The tension between Helen's struggle to assert her unique personhood and the weight of a mythic tradition that places her at the center of war, retribution, and abduction emerges powerfully in Euripides' Helen. At stake, then, are the mythic explanation and justification of a primeval war fought repeatedly [End Page 29] in Greek poetic tradition over the figure now (re)presented on stage. By uniquely synchronizing Helen and her double within a single poetic artifact,2 Euripides' play raises questions about whether Helen's efforts at differentiation and resistance can succeed, and about the status and rationale of the Trojan War, whose center Helen (or, rather, Helens) persistently occupies. This explains why scholars have long been interested in issues of perception, cognition, and the establishment of authenticity in the play. Many have addressed these topics by raising questions regarding the "seriousness" of Euripides' Helen and its status as tragic drama.3 The thorniness of locating and accounting for difference in Helen has also prompted substantial commentary on the epistemological questions raised by Helen and her replica, and such readings have shed light on the play's exploration of the limits and possibilities of human thought and communication.4 Whereas epistemologically oriented approaches have addressed the difficulty of verifying difference in the play, deconstructive readings have raised ontological questions by destabilizing the distinction between the Helen on stage and her identical apparition. In particular, Pietro Pucci (1997), Matthew Gumpert (2001, 43–57), and Gary Meltzer (2006, 188–222) invert earlier readings of Helen's relationship to her double by employing the Derridean notion of the supplement, according to which Euripides' new Helen bears the trace of the eidôlon that continually threatens to replace her.5 By applying a model of substitution to Helen's dramatic action, poststructuralist critics have begun to locate fissures in the barrier between an original Helen and her copy. Epistemological approaches to Euripides' Helen have largely assumed that notions of priority and authenticity remain stable (albeit imperceptible) in the play. Derridean readings of the play, on the contrary, invoke a "structure of replacement" (Pucci 1997, 45–47, 52) and a logic of "supplementarity" (Gumpert 2001, 43–57)—approaches that posit a shifting priority between Helen and her phantom and that do not fully account for Helen's targeted critique of war and violent coercion.6 The latter contributions have initiated crucial dialogue around issues of authenticity and identity in Helen, although their deployment of the logic of replacement limits the potential power and scope of a Derridean reading of the drama, since Jacques Derrida is everywhere concerned with breaking down and diffusing notions of priority and authenticity—a theoretical aim not entirely consistent with the dynamics of replacement and substitution...

Literature Incorporated: The Cultural Unconscious of the Business Corporation, 1650–1850 by John O’Brien

Reviewed by: Literature Incorporated: The Cultural Unconscious of the Business Corporation, 1650–1850 by John O’Brien Richard R. John (bio) Literature Incorporated: The Cultural Unconscious of the Business Corporation, 1650–1850 john o’brien Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016 268pp. In Literature Incorporated, John O’Brien surveys the rise of the corporation in Britain and early America in the period between 1650 and 1850 from an unfamiliar angle. Most historical writing on the corporation in this period treats it as a legal entity. O’Brien shifts our attention to the realm of cultural artifacts. His goal—as he observes in a gloss of John Locke’s Essay concerning Human Understanding (1689), whose writings he explores in his first substantive chapter—is to translate the “unconscious political-economic ideology” of the age into the realm of the conscious “‘idea’” so as to “render it available for critique” (11). Though O’Brien is not unmindful of cultural artifacts that originated in colonial America and the United States, and while he professes to be conversant with recent Anglo-American historical writing on the law, he is primarily concerned with literary texts and cultural icons that originated in late seventeenth-century and early eighteenth-century Britain. Admirers of John Seelye, Leo Marx, John Kasson, and Judith A. McGaw, be forewarned. If you are looking for an analysis of the corporation in early American literature, as it is defined by the editors of this journal, Literature Incorporated does not fit the bill. Indeed, the almost exclusive focus on late seventeenth-century and eighteenth-century Britain makes one wonder if a project that had been originally confined to this topic had been recast at the behest of the editors at a university press to increase its likely readership. Joseph Addison’s tragic drama Cato (1712) and the notorious South Sea Bubble of 1720 receive prominent treatment; John Jacob Astor’s fur-trading empire, as described by Washington Irving in Astoria, and Andrew [End Page 491] Jackson’s veto of the Second Bank of the United States in 1832, as analyzed by generations of historians, do not. Though land speculation fired the imagination of countless Americans while highly speculative ventures to buy and sell the national domain generated a large and often emphatically rhetorical literature, land companies go unmentioned; equally absent is any discussion of the literary response of anyone in Britain or America to canals, railroads, or factories. Specialists in American economic history who are interested in the literary dimension of the economic ideas of John Smith, Benjamin Franklin, or Alexander Hamilton will not find what they are looking for here either. Indeed, the only American figure to receive an extended treatment is Edgar Allan Poe—an unusual choice, given the theme. William Leggett is not in the index, and neither is Herman Melville. Following the lead of the literary critics Marc Shell and Mary Poovey and the economic historian Deidre McCloskey, O’Brien explores the relationship between cultural artifacts and economic phenomena. His primary target is neoclassical economics—with a second, implicit target being the economic history that neoclassicism has inspired. Sympathetic to Louis Menand’s critique of interdisciplinarity as a valorization of the existing disciplines as the only legitimate ways of knowing, he strives for a supradisciplinarity that deploys the methods of the literary critic to expose the metaphorical bedrock on which the discipline of economics has come to rest: “This book sees economics as a way of modeling the world that is more like literature than it is willing to let on” (8). McCloskey’s critique of the mathematization of economics is a particular inspiration: “Literary scholars take economic concepts to be in the first instance imaginative constructs, figures of speech that lend themselves to the same kinds of analysis as all other modes of discourse. That is the goal here” (9). The organization of Literature Incorporated is primarily chronological. Following an introduction that makes the case for the corporation as a literary metaphor, it consists of four substantive chapters that explore, respectively, the ideological significance of John Locke’s late seventeenth-century essays on money; the cultural ramifications of the South Sea Company’s collapse in 1720; the “problem of...

Politics and Aesthetics in European Baroque and Classicist Tragedy ed. by Jan Bloemendal and Nigel Smith

Reviewed by: Politics and Aesthetics in European Baroque and Classicist Tragedy ed. by Jan Bloemendal and Nigel Smith Yolanda Rodríguez Pérez Jan Bloemendal and Nigel Smith, editors. Politics and Aesthetics in European Baroque and Classicist Tragedy. BRILL, 2016. 442 pp. TRAGEDY IS ONE OF THE MOST DISTINCTIVE ancient genres, a well-known object of high literary prestige. However, the consensus that surrounds its relevance starts to wane when attempting to come to a definition of the genre itself. Criticism has frequently focused on dissociating the tragic and tragedy as genre (or mode). If somebody, like the two editors of this well-grounded volume, adds furthermore the permeable qualifications Baroque and Classicist to the term tragedy, the challenge is considerable. Nonetheless, the authors in this collection of essays delve forcefully into the intricacies of Baroque and Classicist tragedy with the wish to contribute to the scholarly debate on the use of these terms within the history of drama and theater, and of political theology. The focus lies on the conjoined character of politics and aesthetics, since "tragedy was an 'aesthetic' way of thinking about many things, and it was particularly suited to rumination upon public affairs" (5). This drama, mainly concerned with the well-known theme of exposing the evils of political tyranny, articulated over time more elaborate and sophisticated themes reflecting on sovereignty, religion, authority, righteousness of rebellion, ethical issues, etc. Tragedy, as undeniable part of the public sphere, exposed, supported, or challenged current perspectives and revealed par excellence the power of literature, and particularly of theater. The book's fourteen chapters are organized into four sections, following an impressive introduction by the two editors, Jan Bloemendal and Nigel Smith, that serves to successfully frame the sections against the historical backdrop of tragedy and to clarify the rationale of the volume. It also offers a wealth of relevant bibliography to date. The four parts that constitute the spine of the volume are sovereignty, religion, ethics, and mobility. With this last part, maybe not obvious at a first glance, the book contributes also to the knowledge of cultural migration of literature throughout Europe and engages with the most recent research lines on the transnational transmission of theater. [End Page 123] Notwithstanding this formal structure into four thematic blocks, the limits are obviously porous and many of these topics come to the fore in the other parts as well. In this way, we see, for instance, that the contribution on Cicognini (essay 9) is categorized under 'ethics' but also deals with sovereignty and intense cultural exchange, or that religion is strongly present in the essay on French tragedy also placed under ethics (essay 10) or how in essay 11 (theme mobility) the focus lies on plays that concentrate on the overarching trend that increasingly separates political sovereignty from morality. The valuable aspects of this book are manifold. One of the main assets is the focus on the intimate links between tragedy and history and the special attention paid to a field that has received less attention than the treatment of history in contemporary vernacular drama: the rich magnitude of historical themes in Neo-Latin theater. Neo-Latin authors do not merely relate to ancient paradigms, in a form of continuation of the tragic drama, but rather reveal the relevant role of Neo-Latin drama in the development of European drama, showing how the humanist tradition from the Low Countries, for instance, exercised unparalleled influence on other contexts like the German lands. Another relevant aspect is the attention paid to Counter Reformation tragedy, a corpus that has been frequently dismissed in the past, whereas the theatrical repertoire of the Baroque tragedy of Jesuits can be considered as a global phenomenon. Far from offering a monolithic 'success model,' their repertoire displayed an incredible variety of form and contents since they were always open to local traditions and resources (essay 6). Equally interesting is the fact that this volume reminds us how the establishment of national literatures in the nineteenth century strongly focused on the singularity of all vernacular European literatures, and therefore on the singularity of separate national tragedies, whereas the European world of letters was obviously created in a flow of...

Tragedy on the Comic Stage by Matthew C. Farmer

BOOK REVIEWS/COMPTES RENDUS 179 is an indication of divine involvement—a point she makes repeatedly (and on which cf. Poetics 1452a4–11)—the basis for this claim remains an accumulation of examples; the argument itself is made ex silentio. Such criticisms do not invalidate Lefkowitz’s central thesis. Indeed, given the persistence of the interpretive tradition which views Euripides as a religious revolutionary,1 it is both necessary and timely. If I am skeptical in some respects, it is because tragedy is a complex art and because I genuinely doubt whether it is possible to make a robust case for what Euripides personally believed on the basis of his poetic output. Lefkowitz, I suspect, may feel the same way, but what else do we have to work with? University of Manitoba C. Michael Sampson Tragedy on the Comic Stage. By Matthew C. Farmer. New York: Oxford University Press. 2017. Pp. xi, 267. In the first part of his book, Matthew Farmer examines systematically, for the first time, what can be said about the treatment of tragedy in the hundreds of Attic comedies of which only fragments survive, under the headings of “tragic culture” (Chapter One, “Electra and the Coal Pan: Tragic Culture in the Comic Fragments”) and “tragic parody” (Chapter Two, “Give Me a Bit of Paratragedy: Tragic Parody in the Comic Fragments”). The former term covers “all the ways the comic poets depict their characters . . . talking about tragedy” (12–13); the latter denotes “comic imitations of tragic language, characters, plot, and spectacle” (69). Farmer recognizes that the dichotomy is somewhat artificial, since the two phenomena tend to occur together and morph into each other (65), but it is useful nevertheless. Tragic culture—interest in, and enthusiasm for, tragic drama—suffuses Athenian society of the fifth and fourth centuries. Farmer makes extensive use of the concept of “fandom” introduced to the study of Athenian drama by Ralph Rosen;1 the tragedy fan is a frequent figure in comedy of all periods. The main diachronic development in comedy ’s reflection of tragic culture is, not surprisingly, an increasing focus on dramatists of the past at the expense of those of the present. Tragic parody is, according to Farmer, “an essential feature of all Greek comedy” (71, 113); certainly we have no complete, or nearly complete, comedy from which tragic parody, as defined above, is absent. Coverage has thus to be selective, but a dozen dramatists receive substantial discussion. Farmer is not entirely consistent in his view of how far the subtler features of tragic parody would be appreciated by audiences. At one point (82) he says that the comic poets wrote for an audience “capable of identifying the original tragic sources . . . and [incorporating them] into their understandings of the parodic comedies”; at another (103), more realistically, he distinguishes between more and less sophisticated spectators (cf. Ar. Eccl. 1155–57 on the contest judges). His discussion of Strattis’ Phoinissai (95–103), however, arguably overestimates the abilities even of the more sophisticated. Thus, according to Farmer (97–98), the parody of Eur. 1 See, for a recent example, Pietro Pucci, Euripides’ Revolution under Cover: An Essay (Ithaca 2016). 1 R. Rosen, “Aristophanes, Fandom and the Classicizing of Greek Tragedy,” in L. A. Kozak and J. W. Rich (ed.), Playing around Aristophanes (Oxford 2006) 27–47. 180 PHOENIX Phoen. 546 in Strattis fr. 48 “shows him . . . as a subtle reader of Euripides’ play” because Phoen. 541–547 “stands out . . . as a crucial turning point in the development of Podlecki’s pattern of sun imagery.” This can be true, however, only if (1) the Euripidean passage does have special structural significance, and (2) Strattis perceived this and expected a non-negligible proportion of his audience to perceive it as well, and (3) a large proportion of his other perverted quotations from Euripides’ play were likewise taken from passages of special critical interest. That is quite a stretch. Part Two of the book focuses on Aristophanes’ Wasps (Chapter Three, “The Man Is Obsessed with Song: A Contest of Genres in Wasps”), Thesmophoriazusae (Chapter Four, “Euripides in the Echo Chamber: Poets and their Poetry in Women at the Thesmophoria”), and Wealth (Chapter Five, “Writing Beyond Genres...

Geografias de <em>hýbris</em>: dialética sujeito-lugar nos enredos da lavoura arcaica de Raduan Nassar

Obra significativa da literatura brasileira, “Lavoura Arcaica”, de Raduan Nassar, é um drama trágico acerca da <em>hýbris</em> de André, o protagonista, à ordem familiar campesina e suas imposições. Pela interpretação geográfica pautada na perspectiva humanista, em particular na fenomenologia existencialista, o texto realiza uma leitura hermenêutica da obra visando desvelar a dialética sujeito-lugar. Explora os desdobramentos das tensões existenciais do lugar de André por meio dos dois momentos da obra: “A partida” e “O retorno”. No decurso do rompimento e arquitetura de vínculos, a tensão se torna um modo de existir no lugar, a ocasionar no extremo do pathos paterno que desconstitui a ordem familiar.

The Tragic Critic after 9/11

In the Autumn of 2002, I Gave a Lecture on Mourning the Dead to Final-Year Undergraduates at the University of Cambridge studying the compulsory course on tragedy. The lecture covered the care devoted to the dead body in Sophocles'sAntigoneand Hamlet's reflections, over Ophelia's grave, on the “fine revolution” of the material corpse (5.1.82-83). But it also extended its range to include the then very recent excavation, for eight and a half months, at Ground Zero in search of the remains of the dead victims of the attack on the World Trade Center, and the simultaneous daily publication in theNew York Timesof “Portraits of Grief.” These portraits, I maintained, fulfilled a similar function to tragic drama by refocusing attention on the individual life and by finding a narrative arc to each victim's story, like Aristotle's tragic plots, which must have “a beginning, a middle, and an end” (26). While the firefighters' digging equipment at Ground Zero searched in vain for the missing remains of about 1800 people and eventually hit bedrock, the newspaper reinvested each lost person with significance, finding a value and a pattern in the person's life.

Comment lire « Au-delà du principe de Plaisir » ?

Comment lire « Au-delà du principe de Plaisir » ?

Violence and Grace: Exceptional Life between Shakespeare and Modernity. Nichole E. Miller. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2014. Pp. x+245.

<i>Violence and Grace: Exceptional Life between Shakespeare and Modernity</i>. Nichole E. Miller. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2014. Pp. x+245.

Violência e crise de legitimidade: um diálogo com a peça Coriolano

Este artigo parte da hipótese de que é possível desenvolver um diálogo interdisciplinar entre a obra teatral de Shakespeare e as teorias jurídicas críticas contemporâneas que estudam o poder a partir do ponto de vista interativo. Poder não é uma substância, mas uma interação que se desintegra e se constitui na relação de mando/obediência. Ele não pode ser confundido com a violência física, mas apenas com a violência simbólica. O trágico drama de Coriolano, de William Shakespeare, é o objeto de análise deste estudo.

Configuring the Baroque: Warburg and Benjamin

ABSTRACTThis essay compares Aby Warburg's and Walter Benjamin's exemplary versions of the Baroque. It examines Warburg's ambivalent, episodic, but demonstrably crucial attempts to make sense of the Baroque style in light of his cardinal concepts of the pathos formula and the ‘prudence’ that he prizes in the artist and ‘cultural scientist’. It thus also considers the agency and ‘anachronism’ of the Baroque artwork. Then the essay turns to how Benjamin's Origin of the German Tragic Drama appropriates Warburg's and the Warburg Circle's writings to help construct an allegorical, but similarly recursive Baroque. Warburg and Benjamin, it contends, are both keen to redeem the Baroque; but Benjamin does so by plumbing the very daemonic depths that Warburg prudently eschews.

The politics of Greek tragedy in Samson Agonistes

ABSTRACTThis essay charts Milton’s engagement in Samson Agonistes with Greek political thought as critiqued in Athenian tragic drama, particularly that of Euripides. In early modern Europe, Euripides’ plays were not only understood to denounce tyranny but also to remain rigorously sceptical about the workings of Athenian democracy (in itself a highly limited kind of representational politics). Milton knew well the commentary tradition that framed Euripidean tragedy in such terms, and found a corollary to his own political views within it, most notably in the writings of Gasparus Stiblinus whose prefaces are included in the 1602 Stephanus edition of the playwright’s works, which he used heavily. Stiblinus shows how Euripides relentlessly scrutinizes corruption, which his tragedies reveal to be not only characteristic of tyrants but also to pervade democratic systems. Milton’s allusions to Euripidean tragic form in Samson Agonistes evoke these commentaries to denounce political corruption.

The Poetry of Experience and the Cockney Profession of Poetry

When Alfred de Musset's Fantasio first appears in the play that bears his name, he asked his friend, Spark, it ever occurred you that have nothing do--no profession, no pursuit? (10) While the imaginative, poetic--and, well, fantastic--Fantasio briefly pursues a career as a court jester, he closes the play proclaiming that even though jesting jobs go is the one he prefers to any other, really can't hold any (44). Fie leaves the play without a profession and without the woman who at first appears serve as his love interest. While Fantasio might appear as another romantic Flamlet who has something within that passes the show of the conventional roles of career and marriage, the incessant concern in the play with Fantasio's suggests something more mundane: that a modern world of business has no place for poetic souls, that the imagination does not figure into the cash nexus. are many such children of the century. From Schiller's Karl Moor Ibsen's Fledda Gabier, the potentially great or creative or simply different dramatic subject finds no objective roles in the modern world show others that which passes within. While in the drama, this gap between subjective ideals and external constraints produces a kind of modern tragic drama, the novel exploring this trajectory appears as a kind of failed bildungsroman. One thinks of Stendhal's Julien Sorel, who dreams of being another Napoleon, but who must make his way as a tutor and a secretary. One could even think of Dostoevsky's Raskolnikov, imagining himself a superman but having only a petty murder commit. More usefully, one should consider Dickens' Pip, seeking his great expectations, perhaps hoping for a life in a country estate with his dream girl Estella, but ending up in Jaggers' London, secretly bankrolled by a convict and living with Herbert Pocket, who is always looking about for a prospect of making a fortune in spices or tobacco or elephant tusks, and who gives Pip the more imaginative name of Handel as a sign of their desire rise above their current state. As Pip notes of Pocket, There was something wonderfully hopeful about his general air, and something that at the same time whispered me he would never be very successful or rich (190). Of course, Pip also returns from being a dreaming Handel back his identity as the boy who once helped an escaped convict. In the original ending the book, Pip concludes life as a kind of burn-out case, having made his way in the trade in India, where he happily with Herbert and his wife, and lived frugally, and paid my debts (520). He sees Estella one last time only reinforce that their differing dreams of success and of love have come naught. Pip may have learned what constitutes a real gentleman, but, like Fantasio, he finds neither a great career nor a fulfilling love. While I do not want reduce these powerful narratives, which presumably reveal something about the massive social transformations of the 19th century that identified with the rise of the middling ranks, a portrait of the artist as a feckless young man, I do want suggest that they can help one think about the ways in which Keats and other writers around him struggled between making poetry and making money. While, among others, I have repeatedly argued for a sense of company in the Keats circle or the Cockney school as sociability and communal creativity, I now want think of company in the business sense. I want explore the tension between the Cockney School's great poetic expectations and the need of most of its members make a living. The periodical, The Dejeune; or, Companion for the Breakfast Table, insisted in 1820 that we cannot serve God and Mammon; cannot be an author and any thing else (December 12, 1820: 357), hut the Cockneys knew it was not that simple. They may all want be Fantasio, able walk away from any job other than imagining a better life, but they live in the world of Herbert Pocket. …

Tragic Modernities by Miriam Leonard

BOOK REVIEWS/COMPTES RENDUS 227 land, but the entire problem is not explained (653). Not every inscription is translated, although those left untranslated are fairly simple (18, 45–46, 49, 53, 179, 185, 445, 456, 522–523, 615, 619). In general, the standard of accessibility is high. The production values are high as well, but I must mention that the first two copies of this book that came into my hands (the review copy and my library’s) had misordered and missing pages (the book jumped from 282 to 411–442 and then back to 315, thus omitting pages 283–314 entirely). The press replaced both, but do check to make sure any volume you buy is complete. The authors of this volume, along with its editors, should be commended. Not only do they fulfill their major stated aim, that of explaining why inscriptions are important, but they have also produced chapters that are useful, accessible, up-to-date—and, in their own way, exciting. The University of Virginia Elizabeth A. Meyer Tragic Modernities. By Miriam Leonard. Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press. 2015. Pp. xiii, 204. This important book challenges the assumption in the title of Steiner’s The Death of Tragedy that modernity offers no fertile ground for tragic drama.1 It argues rather that “to be a modern subject . . . is to be a tragic subject” (3). After a discussion of the definition of the tragic as a philosophical stance in German thinkers of the early nineteenth century, the book considers how the legacy of these thinkers (Schelling, Hegel, and Hölderlin) resurfaces in the philosophies of Marx, Nietzsche, Freud, Benjamin, Heidegger, Schmitt, Arendt, Lacan, Butler, and others. Leonard covers a lot of ground, sometimes somewhat cursorily, but her unifying thread is the reception of Greek tragedy as a structuring concept in modern philosophical thought. This thread follows a thematic rather than a strictly historical path; each of the five chapters addresses a particular configuration of the tragic in modernity, responding to a set of anxieties particular to the modern age. Leonard builds constructively on Williams’s Modern Tragedy, written in response to Steiner, which asserts that “modernity itself was tragic” and thus is fertile ground for the appreciation of a tragic vision in art and thought.2 Leonard is advocating for a return to a philosophical reading of Greek tragedy in the face of a prominent scholarly trend (led by Vernant and others) that approaches it with a historicizing and politicizing agenda opposed to universalizing interpretations. The first chapter, “Tragedy and Revolution,” opens with Arendt’s identification of revolution as a unique feature of modernity. The French and American revolutions and others subsequent to them are characterized by theatricality. This quality, along with the promise of a new narrative for history, introduced an aesthetic framework into the ethical philosophies of Germans like Kant, who watched the violence from a distance. The revolutionary goal of freedom itself (Robespierre’s “despotism of liberty”) introduces a structure common to Greek tragedy in which freedom and constraint are in mutually constitutive tension for the citizens in the polis. For Hegel and Marx, tragedy provides the form for a philosophy of history, even as Marx rejects the poetry of the past as a 1 G. Steiner, The Death of Tragedy (London 1961). 2 R. Williams, Modern Tragedy (London 1966). 228 PHOENIX bourgeois distraction from authentic action on the historical stage. Leonard treats the structure of tragedy as common to both the abstract aesthetic art form and at the same time to human lived experience (personal and political) in modernity in general, but particularly as it is marked by the crises of revolution. As such, tragedy is a crucial medium for ethical analysis. The second chapter, “Tragedy and Metaphysics,” on the post-Kantian philosophical reception of the tragic in the post-revolutionary period, argues that a modern “conception of the tragic gave new voice to the metaphysical paradox of freedom and necessity” (42), a paradox foregrounded by the recent revolutionary movements in the political realm, but one that was also a preoccupation for the Greek tragedians. Leonard surveys aestheticizing philosophical texts from the essay “The Earliest System-Programme of German Idealism,” through...

Melancholy Ontology, Evental Ethics, and the Lost (m)Other in Howard Barker’s Theatre of Catastrophe: An Analysis of 13 Objects

Melancholy Ontology, Evental Ethics, and the Lost (m)Other in Howard Barker’s Theatre of Catastrophe:An Analysis of 13 Objects Alireza Fakhrkonandeh (bio) Without a bent for melancholia there is no psyche, only a transition to action or play. —Julia Kristeva, Black Sun1 [The play] is not about life as it is lived at all, but about life as it might be lived, about the thought which is not licensed, and about the abolished unconscious. —Howard Barker, Arguments2 Howard Barker (1946–) creates a tragic world, the avowed arché and telos of which are death. However, far from being tantamount to cessation, nihilistic terminus, or the perfection of life, death comes to designate not just the unknown, but the unknowable. It thus involves a state of nonknowledge that forecloses the normative values of use and exchange, and the orders of meaning and morality.3 As such, death in Barker’s Theatre of Catastrophe features as essentially inscrutable, being at once phenomenon and nonphenomenon, which is to say, neither phenomenologically perceptible nor representable, belonging to the order of enigma, secret, and silence.4 Barker refers to his Art of Theatre as “crucially an art of death” and, endowing it with an ontologically liminal position, locates his theatre on the bank of the river, which serves as the border between the dead and the living.5 He declares tragedy “the labour of death” and characterizes tragic art primarily as an art that promotes the “feeling for death.”6 Resonant with Schopenhauer’s attestation to the pivotal role of death in human life and thought—whereby death is “the real inspiring genius or the Muse of philosophy,” without which “there would [End Page 365] hardly have been any philosophizing”—Barker discerns death as the most fundamental subject of art and philosophy, declaring it “the subject of all philosophy and all theatre.”7 Resonant with the later Freud’s postulation of death as a fundamental drive and ultimate aim of life (“life is a detour to death”)8 and Heidegger’s ontological-existential consideration of death as immanent in human life,9 Barker observes: “Tragedy’s a priori—that we live only to be destroyed by life—renders the notion of wrong decisions meaningless.”10 Indeed, death constitutes a crux around which other aesthetic principles of Barker’s tragic drama—prominent among which are ethical speculation, contradiction, pain, anxiety, loss, and excess—constellate. Notably for present purposes, having defined the objects of “loss” as (rational, utilitarian, commonsensical, and empirical modes of) “knowledge” and “morality,” he proceeds to associate it with melancholy: “The State of Loss describes a state of lost morality, an ethical vacuum, a denial, a rebuke to order, a melancholy and a pain.”11 Relatedly, as is pervasively evident in his theoretical and dramatic works, pain is pivotal to Barker’s tragic work in thematic, dynamic, and aesthetic terms. Pain, as Barker emphasizes, should be perceived as “not disorder but necessity.” Barker recognizes pain as “spiritually necessary” to the “tragic sensibility,”12 which—considering its association with loss, contradiction, complexity, ethical ambiguity, and transgression—fosters “a melancholy beauty,” which serves as the “whole justification for his theatre.”13 More specifically, Barker establishes a firm, yet fraught, relationship between love, pain, and beauty (though death is also intimately bound up with these three), and molds them into a tension-laden manifold. The ensuing statement confirms the point at issue, with Barker defining his Theatre of Catastrophe as “a theatre…which insists on complexity and pain, and the beauty that can only be created from the spectacle of pain. In Catastrophe…lies the possibility of reconstruction.”14 This aesthetics of loss and excess, this poetics of sacrifice, acquires further dimensions when juxtaposed with the crucial questions of nihilism, the death of God, and ontological inadequacy (that is, the poverty of existence and the paucity of possibility of human existence and experience)—questions with which Barker’s characters are obsessed.15 These features drive us inexorably to the question of melancholia in Barker, [End Page 366] but they also constitute focal points of both modernity and its diagnostic critique both in continental philosophy and modernist literature. The melancholic strain in Barker’s drama...

Playing with Fire-Space: Site-Specific Placement and the Techno-pharmacology of Maria Irene Fornes’s Mud

Playing with Fire-Space: Site-Specific Placement and the Techno-pharmacology of Maria Irene Fornes’s Mud Guy Zimmerman (bio) Many who write about the playwright Maria Irene Fornes’s work comment with reverence about the experience of watching those productions she herself directed.1 Managing somehow to combine frank depictions of cruelty and violence with an odd, otherworldly charm, Fornes’s direction conveyed a distinct sui generis quality that has deflected analytic scrutiny—the exterior operates in such an exquisite fashion one hesitates to lift the hood and look beneath. 1. Fractal Echoing The set is a wooden room which sits on an earth promontory. The promontory is five feet high and covers the same periphery as the room. The wood has the color and texture of bone that has dried in the sun. It is ashen and cold. (Fornes 1234) In Mud’s opening notes, Fornes provides the reader with a vivid and precise stage picture that underscores her background as a painter,2 and that links her work to the image-based directorial signatures of both Samuel Beckett and Robert Wilson. Those familiar with Fornes’s work as a director will recognize this visual precision as the source of the relaxed but hallucinatory clarity that characterized her staging. Objects also figure prominently in Mud’s preliminary stage directions—an ironing board, a plate with green beans on it, an axe, etc.—as do the two doors at the back of the playing space, one leading to the blue sky, So-Cal exterior, the other to a dark corridor. In performance, the role of objects and the uncanny precision of Fornes’s direction give her work a palpable aura of discontinuity in which the part seems subtly privileged at the expense of the whole, as if the work were resisting the allure of unity. This reluctance to embrace synthesis has the effect of defamiliarizing or “queering” Fornes’s work in ways that illustrate how the pharmacological capacity of tragic drama relates to its technical nature. Fornes’s emphasis on discontinuity within the precise image is amplified in Mud’s scene transitions, where the playwright specifies an [End Page 98] explicitly photographic freeze effect that dis-places us in temporal terms even while the play—which was first staged by Fornes in site-specific mode in Claremont, outside of Los Angeles, in 1983—insists on its own placement. This emphatic placement, in turn, gains additional force from its local context—the outskirts of a city that, with its history as one extended real estate speculation, can credibly claim to be the capital of placelessness (Davis 23). The play enforces a kind of epochal displacement as well. With its doorway in the upstage wall, the box-like set is a rough facsimile of the Theatre of Dionysus after Aeschylus added the shed-like skênê (Seaford 161). The play begins with two characters in a chorus-protagonist dyad, a third entering in ways that echo Aeschylus’s addition of a second autonomous character. Near the close, one of the characters, Lloyd, also fulfills the role of the ekkyklema, entering from offstage with a dead body in his arms. During performance, all the machinic elements of the artistic form first actualized by Aeschylus arrive in the correct sequence, as if to recapitulate the concretization of the technical object of tragic drama. The more recent influence of Beckett can also be felt in the minimalist imagery of Fornes’s text, and in its prevailing tone of mordant comedy. Godot’s Pozzo and Lucky are echoed in the abusive dyad that forms between Henry and Lloyd, the reversal in their power dynamic after Scene 12 also echoing the shift between the two characters in Godot. The absent father who brought Lloyd into the house in the distant past calls to mind Watt’s patriarch Mr. Knott, and also Endgame’s Hamm. Mud’s bare bones enclosure of a set is also a variant of the set of Endgame. And yet, while Mud is rooted in the end-ness that characterizes Beckett’s play, it also takes place from within what Agamben calls the “anthropogenic event,” placing arche—origin—as its central concern. Agamben...

This Way Home by Wes Moore (review)

Reviewed by: This Way Home by Wes Moore Elizabeth Bush Moore, Wes This Way Home; by Wes Moore with Shawn Goodman. Delacorte, 2015 [256p] Library ed. ISBN 978-0-375-99019-9 $20.99 Trade ed. ISBN 978-0-385-74169-9 $17.99 E-book ed. ISBN 978-0-375-98671-0 $10.99 Reviewed from galleys R Gr. 7-10 Elijah Thomas and his pals Michael and Dylan are determined to enjoy one last hurrah of basketball glory before senior year and college recruiters inevitably send them down different paths. For the moment, their concentration is on the three-on-three street ball championship held in a run-down but popular court on the divide between their own stable neighborhood and the seedier side of town. Michael has miraculously come up with a “sponsor” who supplies them with shoes and uniforms worthy of champs, but when he reluctantly admits there’s a gang connection to this windfall, the boys decide to play and win in their own old ratty gear, thereby incurring the wrath of their shadowy patron. Dylan is killed by a bullet to the back, Michael is scared stiff he’ll be next, and Elijah desperately seeks the help of a neighborhood man, an ex-Green Beret for whom he does yard work. Many readers, by process of elimination, will suss out Dylan’s killer and perhaps even the gang’s leader, but that won’t diminish the tense and tragic drama that leads to the revelation. With its focus on African-American basketball talents who are challenged by off-court situation, this is a good call for fans of Kevin Waltman’s D-Bow series (Next, BCCB 3/14, Slump, BCCB 12/14) who are ready for a bit more grit. Copyright © 2015 The Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois

John Cranko's Antigone (1959): A Ballet Lost and Found

John Cranko's dramatic and theatrically powerful Antigone (1959) disappeared from the ballet repertory in 1966 and this essay calls for a reappraisal and restaging of the work for 21st century audiences. Created in a post-World War II environment, and in the wake of appearances in London by the Martha Graham Company and Jerome Robbins’ Ballets USA, I point to American influences in Cranko's choreography. However, the discussion of the Greek-themed Antigone involves detailed consideration of the relationship between the ballet and the ancient dramas which inspired it, especially as the programme notes accompanying performances emphasised its Sophoclean source but failed to recognise that Cranko mainly based his ballet on an early play by Jean Racine. As Antigone derives from tragic drama, the essay investigates catharsis, one of the many principles that Aristotle delineated in the Poetics. This well-known effect is produced by Greek tragedies but the critics of the era complained about its lack in Cranko's ballet – views which I challenge. There is also an investigation of the role of Antigone, both in the play and in the ballet, and since Cranko created the role for Svetlana Beriosova, I reflect on memories of Beriosova's interpretation supported by more recent viewings of Edmée Wood's 1959 film.

The “German” Origin of the Birth of Theory

When Walter Benjamin gave his so-called baroque book its title—Ursprung Des Deutschen trauerspiels (origin of the German Tragic Drama; 1928)—he was clearly in dialogue with Nietzsche's project in Die Geburt der Tragödie (The Birth of Tragedy; 1872). Indeed, it is the difference between the traditional concept of birth (Geburt) and the Benjaminian notion of origin (Ursprung)—and thus the failure of the mourning play's origin to be a matter of its genesis (Entstehung) in ancient tragedy—that helps us see what Benjamin claims is the difference between the two genres and the way he would have us read the “historical” periods aligned with each (Newman 74). Moreover, precisely because the origin of the Trauerspiel is not a monodirectional birth for Benjamin, his commentary on the complex amalgam of ancient and medieval, Renaissance and baroque, and Lutheran and Catholic ideological forces and aesthetic forms that battle it out in the historical seventeenth-century Silesian dramas that he takes as his subject can be read both as an account of the multiple temporalities that shaped these odd plays and as a reflection on how those same forces traveled forward in time to shape the social, political, and existential concerns of his own, early-twentieth-century German modernity—which of course had helped produce his account of the early modern in the first place (Koepnick; Newman). Benjamin's famous association of his theory of Ursprung with a “Strudel… im Fluss des Werdens” (“eddy in the stream of becoming”) thus helpfully confounds the conventional directionality of Geburt by literally muddying the waters of just where the origin of any period's meaning might lie (226; my trans.).

&lt;b&gt;The &lt;i&gt;Opus Dei&lt;/i&gt; of violence in Augusto Matraga

The experiences experienced by men in modernity transform literary narratives, thematically and formally, establishing the aim to use allegory as an explanatory stage of that new reality. In the book The Origin of German Tragic Drama, by Walter Benjamin, he conceives allegory as the revelation of a hidden truth that does not represent things just as they are, but provides a version of how they were or might have been. As a reflection of the principles implied in that reading, this paper takes Benjamin's allegory as an analytical category aiming at identifying the representation of violence in the short story A hora e a vez de Augusto Matraga (The Hour and Turn of Augusto Matraga), by Guimaraes Rosa. Our analysis opens a dialogue with the dialectical perspective, in which social-historical conditioning factors contribute to understand Minas Gerais backlands, whose ethos supplies a perception of the world incorporated by Guimaraes Rosas' poetics, widening the view of a violent and enchanting world.

But, isn’t Timon of Athens Really Trauerspiel?

I argue that Shakespeare's Timon of Athens exemplifies the concept of mourning play that Walter Benjamin had in mind when he wrote The Origin of German Tragic Drama. While others have interpreted the play in various ways, no one has attempted to understand Timon in a Benjaminesque manner that seeks to show the emergence of baroque tragedy as a new aesthetic form at odds with, and liberated from, classical tragedy's mythical foundation and instead premised on historical time and progress. In my discussion, I question the view that Timon possesses inheritable or transmissible human social bonds that can be the subject of annihilation as is the case in Shakespeare's other tragedies. Rather, Benjamin sees in allegory, as illustrated by Timon of Athens, the social condition of modernity replete with suffering, chaos, and violence, but devoid of real human bonds; indeed, it is without human meaning.