Tragic Form Research Articles

Szenen einer Gattung

Abstract The paper discusses metapoetic reflections in German drama around 1800. It argues that Goethe, Schiller and Kleist challenge the tragic form by blurring the differences to lyric and epic poetry. The starting point is the thesis that the paradigm of heroism, which has defined the tragic genre from the very beginning, falls into crisis. Both contemporary poetics and literary texts demonstrate this development: Heroism neither functions as an ideal way to constructing a character nor of organizing political plots which successfully rely on and account for personal greatness. To illustrate this, the essay focuses on significant metapoetic scenes from Goethe’s, Schiller’s and Kleist’s dramas and reads them as ‘scenes from a genre’ for which the female characters play a decisive role. Thus, it discusses how the selected dramas reflect on the principles of genre and on the ever-permeable boundaries of genre which lead to questions of political heroism and charismatic authority at the dawn of modernity. The political drama would therefore be incomplete without taking into account the gendering of political agency. Political heroism as well as the form of heroic tragedy are challenged by critical perspectives brought into play by female voices.

Древнегреческий театр как школа для города: почему Сократ не был театралом

The article explores the phenomenon of ancient Greek theater, portraying it as a unique space where an entire cityscape unfolded before the eyes of thousands of spectators. Despite its mesmerizing effect, there's ongoing debate about its educational impact. In the first part of the article, sources are analyzed in which ancient authors argue for or against the notion that the theater, for which Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides composed, and which was occasionally attended by Socrates, could serve as a kind of school for adults and adolescents. Plato's dialogues, featuring Socrates as the central figure, dissect the differences between philosopher, playwright, and sophist wisdom, suggesting that the theater may not have been primarily aimed at enlightening the masses, but rather at showcasing persuasive rhetoric. Aristotle and Aristophanes stress the importance of playwrights acting as guides for citizens, albeit acknowledging that not all possess the wisdom to effectively mentor citizens in civic engagement and personal growth. In the second part, the article analyzes select tragedies by Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, seen as valuable sources for instructing citizens. These playwrights' works are depicted as poignant reflections of the challenges faced by inhabitants of various cities, with heroes striving to offer guidance to themselves or others. Based on Aristotle's classification of tragic forms, it suggests that protagonists in these tragedies undergo transformative experiences, whether through reversal, discovery, calamity and spectacle. This also opened up wide opportunities for spectators to project what was happening on stage onto themselves and their city, taking guidance from the playwrights and becoming a special kind of disciples.

Tragedy of Monsters: Vampire Fears, Melodrama, and the Modern Horror

The contemporary understanding of the vampire trope is not solely a literary construct but also the outcome of its theatrical adaptations, often following closely after the publication of the seminal works that shaped the myth. Despite the occasional reading of vampires as tragic figures, works featuring these creatures have yet to be staged as tragedies, translating instead to melodramas and musicals. This article examines theatrical renditions of John Polidori’s “The Vampyre” (1819), Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897), and Anne Rice’s Interview with the Vampire (1976) and The Vampire Lestat (1985), demonstrating that although these literary works offer varying interpretations of the vampire trope, they consistently diverge from the tragic form once thet are adapted for the stage. At the same time, vampires represent a world of post-tragic plots, where tragedy is impossible since they live too long after the tragic event had already occurred. Our theory is that the staging of vampire narratives coincides with historical contexts in which audiences experience disillusionment with tragedy’s promise of catharsis, opting instead to look to other dramatic formulas for a reflection of their times. While tragedies often depict the protagonist’s downfall due to an internal fatal flaw, vampire melodramas and musicals, in most cases, explore the collective trauma caused by external flaws, thus resonating more with the social and cultural milieu of their times.

Measuring Tragedy—and Drawing Its Borders

The present article introduces the METRA project, a project within which 22 researchers coordinated by Professor Franco Moretti will analyze the tragic form across 12 European cultures, making use of literary geography, comparative poetics, and a broad array of computational tools. This special issue of Transilvania represents a preliminary foray into the project’s topic, meant to present METRA’s methodology and discuss the generic, chronological, and geographic delimitations of tragic form.

Malaria ca tragedie națională: Semnele lui Dănuț (1922) de Gib I. Mihăescu

Some of Franco Moretti’s earliest works investigated the tragic form qua allegory of the desacralization of sovereignty and/ or as an allegory of civil war. Inspired by this type of conceptualization, in the present essay I turn the mirror on an endemic malady which I instrumentalize as an allegory of a national tragedy or as an allegory of the contemporary way of life (concerning especially the 19th-20th century way of life). In this vein, I assert that, just as a literary species can do that, a particular type of illness – an endemic one, such is malaria – can capture a symbolic function in literature. It is the function of expressing a collective drift, a bunch of socio-anthropological symptoms, specters of state policies or rather of their absence.

BEREAVED PARENTS OF THE HEALTH AND RETIREMENT STUDY

Abstract The loss of a child—no matter their age—is often regarded as one the most tragic forms of loss. Here, we sought to identify sociodemographic, psychosocial, and health profiles of older adults who have experienced offspring death in the Health and Retirement Study (HRS). Our sample was composed of 2,035 respondents from the 2018 wave of HRS who experienced (n =381) or did not experience (n = 1,654) the loss of a child at any point in their lifetime. In an adjusted logistic regression, we found that both women (OR=1.53, [1.13, 2.09]) and non-Hispanic Black respondents (OR = 1.85; [1.31, 2.61]) had significantly higher odds of experiencing the death of a child. Education was also significantly associated with offspring death: relative to individuals with less than a high school education, high school and college-educated respondents had a 34% and 64% lower likelihood of reporting offspring death, respectively (OR=0.66, [.47, .91]; OR=0.36, [.25, .51]). Lastly, every one unit increase in cognition was associated with a 3% lower likelihood of experiencing the offspring death (OR=0.97, [.94, .99]). Interestingly, bereaved parents were no more likely to experience depression nor report multimorbidity than individuals who had not grieved the loss of a child. These findings highlight a grim picture of premature and untimely death among Black Americans, the power of education, and potential psychological and physiological resilience among this older sub-population of bereaved parents.

Der komische Chor – das Chorische der ‚komischen Person‘

While the tragic chorus has drawn much attention and analysis, the comedic chorus has gone largely overlooked in the fields of classical philology, literary studies, philosophy, and theater studies. But the chorus of Greek comedy is distinct from that of tragedy. It is a kind of swarm. It lives on in the comical personage of later comedies, though these presumably have no chorus. The choruses oppose the unity of dramatic form, as is shown in particular by the parabasis. They introduce displacements that repeatedly disturb the representations demanded by the tragic form and usher in the performative events that take place between the chorus and the spectators (and listeners). As this article shows, choric elements are therefore hardly an outdated episode of theatrical presentation. Comical personages like Buffo and Pulcinella are not closed, individuated characters but theatrical figures that belong in a series. They come from a chorus without preexisting distinctions and boundaries—a chorus of those who do not belong, of indefinite heterogeneities.

Reframing Tragedy

Reframing Tragedy

비극형 우렁색시 설화의 전설적 특성과 현실 인식

In this paper, I examined 38 tragic versions of ‘Snail Maiden(우렁색시)''. These are divided into ‘(A) male and female transformation type’, ‘(B) breakup type’, and ‘(C) remarriage type’ according to the pattern of the ending. In type (B), which was recorded relatively later, ‘seogi (瑞气)’ is replaced by beauty, etc., and taboo motifs are omitted, showing a secularization aspect in which the mystic pixels are reduced or omitted. In ‘Snail Maiden(우렁색시)'', the injustice of the powerful taking the wife of a man from the lower classes is denounced. In the face of the tragic situation of tyranny of those in power, the mystic divine aspects in dark poetry such as ‘coming down from the sky(적강, 謫降)’, ‘the notion of Dragon Palace’ and ‘mysterious energy(서기)’ are powerless and play a role in heightening the tragic situation. In the simple type and the overcoming hardship type, which are the marriage types, they provide comfort in a harmonious world where fantasy and transcendent power help the protagonist to lead to a happy ending. However, in the tragic type, divine power is frustrated by the violence of the world. Through the image of the world that does not meet the resentment and expectations of the self, the tragic type depicts the suffering self as dwarfed in the face of the violence of the world. It is believed that the existence of the tragic form up to the 38 versions has helped to bring us to a fuller understanding of life by making us wary of a world where lawlessness and violence are rampant. The Korean folktale tradition group was able to gain hope and comfort through the relationship-type of ‘Snail Maiden(우렁색시)'', and at the same time, could be wary of the dangers and evil circumstances that exist in human life through the tragic versions of it.

As If a Stranger at the Door: Hospitality and Tragic Form in Democratic Athens

As If a Stranger at the Door: Hospitality and Tragic Form in Democratic Athens

When Time Is Out of Joint

I argue that the il y a is intrinsically connected to Levinas’s understanding of the tragic, and that Levinas offers an original reading of Shakespearean tragedy that goes beyond traditional aesthetic conceptions of artistic and tragic form and breaks with ancient tragedy. The il y a is implicated in the limit moment Levinas encountered while in captivity, suspended from the world, when time was out of joint. Focusing on Hamlet, who some have argued represents a failure of aesthetic form, I suggest rather that in construing Hamlet as the tragedy that constitutes a reflection on the meaning of the tragic il y a, Levinas identifies Shakespeare’s originality as a tragedian by pointing to the ungraspability of the formless. For Levinas, the tragic lies not in death but in having to be. Levinas’s incipient theory of Shakespearean tragedy provides insight into the complex role art plays for Levinas.

Tragic Form in Kamila Shamsie’sHome Fire

AbstractThis article examines Kamila Shamsie’s adaptation of Sophocles’ Antigone in Home Fire (2017), a novel focused on Muslim identity, Islamophobia, and citizenship rights in contemporary Britain. It demonstrates that this novel is a multimedia work full of theatrical traces: a literary archive that preserves the dramatic quality of Sophocles’ play but also encompasses multiple other forms of media and performance, from theatre and television to social media. The article focuses not so much on how Shamsie has adapted the plot of Antigone but on her reworking of tragedy’s formal features or structures, such as dialogue, the chorus, and the messenger speech. In this polyphonic novel, such multimedia theatricality facilitates something that Greek tragedy itself produces: a contestation of multiple voices for audiences to hear, critique, and put against their own. Shamsie’s manipulation of tragic form thus contributes to Home Fire’s political import.

“Talking of the Fairy Road”: Modulations of the Seanchaí in Conor McPherson’s The Weir

Focusing on The Weir (1999), one of Irish playwright Conor McPherson’s masterpieces, this study attempts to elaborate the ways in which the Irish traditional seanchai is mirrored in this play. A seanchai is an Irish traditional storyteller, who has always been one of the most prevalent features of Irish folklore and which has recently been revived by Irish playwrights. In The Weir, McPherson incorporates the old seanchai tradition and places it within modern human contexts. Except for one, each of the characters of the play is playing the role of a seanchai, which is manipulated by McPherson not only to depict a popular Irish tradition but also to present human interior feelings of fear, trauma, and desolation. This paper testifies to the enduring importance of the role of Irish traditional seanchai, which has adapted and survived over modernization. The analysis aims not just to understand the ways in which the play uses the seanchais’ techniques but also explores the significance of the stories narrated by each of these seanchais in the play. The Irish seanchai tradition is known for its eloquence. Likewise, seanchais in The Weir expressively narrate their stories to generate gorgeous, realistic, and sometimes tragic form of drama, which reflects an artfulness that renders this play distinct amongst other plays.

Two Theories

Two Theories

Tragedia attica e filosofia. Osservazioni sulla funzione cognitiva dell’arte tragica

The paper proposes a new understanding of the relationship that links philosophy and literature, assuming the Greek tragedy of the 5th century BC as the exemplary occasion for the development of this enquiry. In this perspective, moving from the original interpretation of the tragedy recently offered by Pierre Judet de La Combe, the paper shows how the specific cognitive function of the tragedy, understood as “artistic form”, consists in its ability to bring to manifestation, in exemplary way, the “conditions of sense” that make possible any knowledge of experience, with the consciousness of the aesthetical-imaginative and not logical-conceptual character of these same conditions. From this point of view, the critical and reflexive function of the tragedy is due – according to the Adornian interpretation – to the autonomy of the “form”, i.e. to the sensible configuration of the tragedy. What emerges, here, is the “non-reproductive” but “productive” nature of the tragic form: what it offers to the spectator is not the representation of a sense already given in the world, but rather an “indefinite opening to meaning”, i.e. a form able to construct an indeterminate multiplicity of “possibilities of sense”.

Murder-Suicides Perpetrated by Adolescents: Findings from the National Violent Death Reporting System.

Murder-suicide is a rare and especially tragic form of violence. Nascent literature has characterized murder-suicide perpetrated by adults, but no study has focused on adolescents who perpetrated murder-suicide. This study evaluated all cases of murder-suicide perpetrated by persons under age 21 who were included in the National Violent Death Reporting System, and categorized each incident using Joiner's perversion of virtue framework of murder-suicide. Forty-seven incidents of murder-suicide perpetrated by adolescents were identified, representing 56 victims. Most cases did not have sufficient information to be categorized within a particular perversion of virtue. Among the 20 cases who did have sufficient detail to be categorized, incidents were identified as perversions of self-control (n = 11), justice (n = 8), and mercy (n = 1). Most perpetrators were male, and the majority of victims were female. Additional victim, perpetrator, and incident characteristics are described. Our findings extend previous work by employing a coding system based on a theoretically derived framework for categorizing "genuine" murder-suicide and related behavior among adolescents. This study also characterized the nature of this complex and tragic sequence of behavior among adolescents, who are at elevated risk of suicide, and who may benefit from prevention efforts that effectively address means safety, suicidality, and intimate partner violence.

Marina Carr’s Hecuba: agency, anger and correcting Euripides

ABSTRACTThis paper focuses on Marina Carr’s 2015 adaptation of Hecuba for the Royal Shakespeare Company. Hecuba sees Carr return to a fascination with Greek tragedy, difficult female characters and reimagining foundational myths. Of all Euripides’ plays Hecuba has rarely been popular, yet the themes Carr prises open – of violence, desire, gendered experience and the politics of perspective – are acutely topical. Indeed, Hecuba seemed to anticipate the frustrations that erupted on 28 October 2015 in response to the Abbey Theatre’s “Waking the Nation” programme. Drawing on twentieth and twenty-first century debates around the politics of tragic form, Roland Barthes theorising of myth, and the tradition of Greek adaptation in modern Irish drama, this paper examines how Hecuba reorients its sources. It goes on to assess the outcomes of these reorientations in order to problematise the critical predisposition to find an inevitably progressive poetics/politics in her engagement with tragic myths.

Past, Passivity, Passion: Deleuze's Allegorical Drama

This article offers a rhetorical analysis of Deleuze's concept of the past, understood not as a modification of the present but as a pre-predicative, non-subjective articulation of time. Focusing on the discussion of the three passive syntheses of time in Chapter 2 of Difference and Repetition, it traces the continuity between past, passivity and passion across Deleuze's body of work in an effort not only to remark on the conceptual resonances between them, but, more importantly, to examine the figural and formal choices that codify those resonances, and to some extent over-determine them – in particular, Deleuze's recourse to allegory and tragic form. Though the past is constituted as a primordial component of time, it already exceeds itself in the passivity of that constitutive moment, of that originary gesture by which it is first committed to historical experience. The process is rendered in dramatic terms: Habitus and Mnemosyne (Habit and Memory; Present and Past) are first pitted against each other – respectively, as the origin of time and its ground. They are then overthrown by an unnamed third element ‘which subordinates the other two to itself’ and opens the whole to infinity. The article thematises the significance of the past within this allegorical drama, develops the character, and draws out the temporal structures encoded in Deleuze's figurations.

‘The carcasse speakes’: Vital corpses and prophetic remains in Thomas May’s Antigone

This article examines Thomas May’s Antigone (c. 1631), a play deeply engaged in making sense of somatomancy (body divination) in the context of violence and tragedy, in demonstrating the paradoxical vitality of the prophetic corpse (which occupies an indeterminate position between life and death, between being an active prophetic agent and a passive prophetic instrument), and in puzzling out the role of the mutilated body in producing tragic knowledge. In its reworking of Sophocles, Lucan, and other tragic source material, May’s tragedy brings to light a crucial triadic relationship between the violated body, knowledge, and tragic form, showing how the body – because of the violence to which it is submitted, and via the privileged knowledge it produces – propels tragic action.

Rethinking Aristotle’s Hamartia: The Igbo Nigerian Tragic Form in Chinua Achebe’s Fiction

Rethinking Aristotle’s Hamartia: The Igbo Nigerian Tragic Form in Chinua Achebe’s Fiction Ignatius Chukwumah (bio) Tragedy as a literary form is no doubt present in African literature. Like most human creations, it arises from “a pan-human universal experience unlimited by national or ethnic barriers” (Anyokwu 1). In Wole Soyinka’s words, [t]he persistent search for the meaning of tragedy, for a redefinition in terms of cultural or private experience is, at the least, man’s recognition of certain areas of depth-experience which are not satisfactorily explained by general aesthetic theories; and of all the subjective unease that is aroused by man’s creative insights, that wrench within the human psyche which we vaguely define as ‘tragedy’ is the most insistent voice that bids us return to our own sources. (140) Implied in Soyinka’s comment above are a couple of truths: first, the reaffirmation of the universality of the tragic principle, and second, the inadequacy of any one extant aesthetic theorizing of tragedy to account for the concept, since the examination of tragedy as human experience will continue. In other words, any one perspective of tragedy is not the last word on it, with many cultures articulating the tragic experience in varied ways. Accordingly, Henry A. Kelly agrees that tragedy is of different kinds (xv). Despite its uniqueness, the African thought on tragedy, with the exception [End Page 223] of the Yoruba espoused by Soyinka, remains on tentative ground and un-theorized. That is especially true of Igbo approaches to tragedy even as some narratives of the Igbo of Nigeria are highly praised as tragic. For example, Jeffrey Easto, while glossing over textual references and filial relationships in Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart (1958) and No Longer at Ease (1960), identifies what he terms “the commonalities of tragedy and fate” of their protagonists: Okonkwo and Obi Okonkwo, respectively (60). Both men, he contends, bow to pressures emanating from the white man’s world, and suffer a depressing end. Arrow of God (1964), another of Achebe’s novels, is an eminent text with an imposing tragic hero. However, Owen Mordaunt offers a twist to this, from the tragedy of the individual to that of the community, by seeing “the tragedy of Umuaro” inscribed in “the tragedy of Ezeulu,” the work’s protagonist (160). But if these narratives substantially qualify as tragedy, a concept that takes “in narrative as well as dramatic works” (Kelly xv), how can one be well acquainted with their peculiar form? What sort of tragedy are they; in what form do Africans capture their experience as tragedy, in contrast to the Western idea of it; and how can such African aesthetic concepts as, say, the Igbo notion of nso—the code of order ordained by Ala, the Igbo Earth goddess and guardian of morality—illuminate Aristotle’s key element of tragedy, hamartia? Insights generated by these queries will enrich our understanding of suffering in modern Igbo narratives, which will constitute our primary context, though extra-literary references will assist in mounting the argument of this essay. This work argues that the tragic form in African literature varies from the Western sort, as elaborated in Sophocles’s Oedipus the King and theorized in Aristotle’s On the Art of Poetry. I seek to establish the distinctiveness of African tragedy by revising Aristotle’s fundamental concept, hamartia, and substituting the nso concept for it, as discernible in the existing Igbo worldview of these narratives, with a focus on the tragic works of Chinua Achebe. Achebe is not only a foremost Igbo novelist, but Africa’s leading light in the tragic genre. Analysis of his novels proceeds in the order of the sequence of represented historical realities inasmuch as they evince the theoretic purposes of this project and disclose useful insights beneficial for the rest of the African tragic narrative tradition. [End Page 224] Aristotle’s Theory of Tragedy S. A. Dseagu, in his insightful essay on “The Tragic Ethos in African Literature,” proposes that the African concept of man departs from the Western sort (238–58). Whereas it fits Western orientation that the individual paves way for the general public, resulting in tragedy that...