Tragic Mode Research Articles

Tragic Ending and Inversion in The Tale of Orchid Dream

AbstractThis essay examines the representation of gender conflict in the late Qing novel Lanhua meng qizhuan (The tale of orchid dream) through an analysis of the novel's responses to its two literary models: Cao Xueqin's Honglou meng (Dream of the red chamber) and Wen Kang's Ernü yingxiong zhuan (A tale of heroes and lovers, 1878). Written as an imitation of Cao Xueqin's masterpiece and a reversal of Wen Kang's novel (itself also a rewriting of Cao Xueqin's work), Lanhua meng qizhuan consciously returns to the tragic mode of representation while it re-polarizes the themes of heroism and love (or ritualized morality versus private feeling) in its portrayal of the married life of a female hero, Song Baozhu. Through the deterioration of the heroine's marriage and her death, the novel exposes the deep-seated male centeredness in Chinese society and culture. At the same time, it reveals the ideological and artistic clashes of the hero-lover model promoted by Wen Kang and undermines his effort of assimilating qing (love, feelings) into the domain of public morality. The author's effort in Lanhua meng qizhuan, while seriously tackling the social problem of gender inequality in its time, also challenged old conventions and opened new avenues in Chinese fiction.

Race and the Tragic Mode in Ernest J. Gaines's A Gathering of Old Men

Race and the Tragic Mode in Ernest J. Gaines's A Gathering of Old Men Raphaël Lambert (bio) Ernest Gaines's A Gathering of Old Men (1983) takes place in the late 1970s on the land of the Marshall plantation, a remote, unreconstructed spot in rural Louisiana. The novel tells the story of a group of humble African American elders who, for the first time in their lives, have resolved to stand up to their white oppressors. What makes Gathering vivid and compelling is Gaines's use of a variety of theatrical conventions to dramatize a simple story of revenge against a backdrop of enduring racial oppression. The first part of this essay shows that Gathering, while organized according to standard dramatic conventions, is also a celebration of African American vernacular and rhetoric as tools for subverting authority. This emphasis on verbal performance, the systematic questioning of everyday reality, as well as the choric outlook of the group of old men, narrows the focus of this essay from theatricality to tragedy. As Gaines once acknowledged, "the sense of Greek tragedy … keeps coming back in my writing" (qtd in Lowe 30), and the second part of this essay further explores the influence of Greek tragedy on Gaines's work. While this section brings into light the elements of Greek tragedy that characterize the novel, it also argues that the ethics of Greek tragedy are better suited than modern literary conventions and contemporary moral values to convey the idiosyncrasies of the black experience in the deep [End Page 106] South. Ultimately, Gathering is anything but what a slapdash review once called "a Louisiana pageant of calamity" and a "morality play" (Price 15). The novel highlights the complexity of the social and racial equation in 1970s Louisiana, provides a more acute understanding of past and present realities, and challenges the widespread and complacent notion that change is impossible. Theatrical Characteristics in Gathering Tragedy is a crisis … in the wake of which no one among the heroes is the same as before. —Pierre Vidal-Naquet, Le miroir Brisé1 The opening scene of Gathering is deceptively simple: Beau Boutan, a Cajun farmer, has been shot dead in front of the cabin of Mathu, a solitary, charismatic African American elder. The back story to this simple murder, however, is really what Gathering is all about: the murder of a white man by a black man immediately exacerbates the racial tensions that saturate the fragile social mosaic of this isolated southern locality that has remained unchanged by the reforms of the civil rights movement. Choosing not to "crawl under the bed like [they] used to" (28), the old men have gathered in Mathu's yard where they brace themselves for the showdown with Fix Boutan, the father of the victim. There is no doubt in the minds of the hoary old lot that Fix, notorious for his bigotry and cruelty against black people, will show up to avenge the murder of his son. Everything designates Mathu as the culprit, but each old man has come to Mathu's with a gun loaded with one empty number-five shell similar to the one that killed Beau. When Sheriff Mapes gets there to arrest Mathu, each and every man stands before Mapes and claims, "I did it." The originality of Gathering derives in part from its multiple-perspective narration, in which all kinds of individuals—white and black, male and female, old and young, and rich and poor—have something to say about the murder of Beau Boutan. Sometimes complementary, sometimes discordant, the voices in Gathering are often organized in dialogues that, along with other forms of communication (gazes, silences, and body language), contribute to make Gathering a theatrical novel. Gathering also resembles a play as it observes the three unities of time, place, and action.2 The story takes place in one day, from the killing of Beau Boutan to the final shootout. Almost everything happens in one place: Mathu's [End Page 107] yard. Finally, the story follows the standard formula whereby theatrical action is organized according to (1) exposition—the murder of Beau; (2) complication—the armed old men hope for a deadly showdown...

Introduction: the survival of tragedy in European Romanticisms

The “Romantic movement” is frequently indicated as the cultural phase in which the writing of proper tragedy becomes impossible. In fact, European literatures of the Romantic period see no actual “death” of tragedy but rather present an astonishing array of multiple and simultaneous reinventions of this time‐honored genre and of its attendant tragic mode. This Introduction surveys a variety of theoretical and dramaturgic engagements with tragedy and the tragic in European literatures between the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth centuries in order to identify their “survival” within networks of cultural exchange, discourses of national culture, and the development of new hybrid forms of drama and theater.

Tragedy, Theodicy and 9/11: Rhetorical Responses To Suffering and Their Public Significance

Two general sorts of responses to the suffering caused by the 9/11 attacks are distinguishable in the statements of public officials, journalists, and citizens: one manifests a tragic sensibility, another takes the form of theodicy. Each response entails a distinctive set of expectations about the nature of political agency and solidarity in a democracy. With its claim of access to a transcendental form of truth, theodicy promises a robust sense of political solidarity and agency based on a shared religious belief. Tragic modes of appeal muster their consolatory effects by appealing to intuitions or taste rather than religious belief and therefore potentially remain open to more diverse public audiences.

Pastoralism and the ‘Wild Man’ in an Early Arabic Romance

This article analyzes the tragic mode in Majnūn Laylā, an Arabic romance from the late seventh and early eighth centuries ce, i.e. the Umayyad period. It argues that this romance constructs the tragic mode in terms of a thematics of social conflict between the old Bedouin order and the new Islamic ethos. This is accomplished through an examination of the two main polarities that characterize Majnūn Laylā, namely ‘pastoral’ versus ‘anti-pastoral’ and ‘domestic’ versus ‘wild’. A key claim is that the romance hero, Majnūn, is rendered as a ‘wild man’ who embodies the clash between the two opposing social orders, Bedouin and Islamic.

Post-Soul Aesthetics in Contemporary African American Art

In 1926, W. E. B. Du Bois announced to a meeting of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) that all art must be propaganda to help improve the condition of the race (22). Du Bois's own foray into visual culture certainly follows this prescription. For the 1900 Paris Exposition, he collected a series of images to describe the progress of African Americans since the Civil War. Du Bois carefully selected images that portrayed the successful integration of African Americans into capitalism and demonstrated that African Americans shared core middle class American values (D. L. Lewis 30). Despite his articulation of double consciousness just a few years earlier, these images do not reflect conflicted psyches, but achievement and social worth. Alain Locke followed a less political, but similarly idealistic perspective on the role of art within African American cultures. Opposed to Du Bois's emphasis on the politics of art, Locke attempted to demonstrate how aesthetic values and forms followed from cultural experience (49-50). Art, for Locke, served as a barometer to determine the growth and development of a people or culture. The Civil Rights era and its aftermath challenged both the Du Boisian and the Lockean approaches to African American art. Black Power not only deployed visual culture for political purposes, but demanded that artists and audiences alike re-think the definition of beauty and thus art itself. Neither images of respectability (like Du Bois's images in Paris) nor the African-derived aesthetics of Aaron Douglas or Jacob Lawrence challenged power relations sufficiently. Civil Rights era artists, such as Charles White, created images that demonstrated the humanity of African Americans to break down the barriers of segregation. White relied on tragic modes to narrate or visualize African American experiences, to lift up the race, and to challenge white supremacy. The next generation rebelled against bourgeois appeals in African American art. Defiant and angry, the Civil Rights era work, especially at the height of the Black Power movement, implicitly assumed that visual imagery could alter social relations and the world. It emphasized the struggles of romantic heroes against a racist society, knowing what needs to be done and demanding immediate change. From Jean-Michel Basquiat and the graffiti writers to a new generation of African American artists, post-soul aesthetics have shifted the tone and content of recent art from Civil Rights and Black Power strategies. This essay explores how and why irony--rather than tragedy or romance--has come to dominate contemporary African American art. Specifically, I explore how Alison Saar and Michael Ray Charles have depicted post-soul black bodies. Infused with humor and irony, the work of these artists question realism (exemplified by artists such as Henry Tanner, Charles White, and Gordon Parks), Afrocentric imagery (typified by Aaron Douglas, Jacob Lawrence, and Romare Bearden), and protest art (illustrated by Betye Saar and Faith Ringgold) as useful strategies in the contemporary era. Instead, they demonstrate how previous generations relied on overdetermined poses or models to create their art and question how traditional notions of art and beauty have perpetuated racial inequality. This ironic mode of representing black bodies has been popular with white collectors and thus has been problematic for African Americans because it frequently invokes stereotypes to de-bunk them, and such images have been a bit too popular with white audiences. This essay concludes that post-soul aesthetics have liberated artists to question the social construction of race, but invites a re-examination of ways that African American art is or should be connected to African American communities, and it predicts that the contemporary scene's emphasis on irony will most likely revert to a reinvigorated of realism. Irony Incorporated Traditional analyses of irony, such as literary Northrop Frye's, define the practice as giving form to the shifting ambiguities and complexities of unidealized existence (Frye 223). …

Jose Triana and the Tragic Mode: Three plays

In three early plays, the Cuban playwright Jose Triana (b. 1931) chose to emulate the most notable Greek tragedians. But he opted for assimilation of technique rather than crass imitation, seeking to portray the social, political and religious aspects of his island's society in tragic terms that aligned his works with the plays of Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides, who had similarly viewed their societies. Triana saw parallels between 1950s Cuba and ancient Greece; he used the tragic framework but without eschewing the characteristics of the land and people he was depicting. Consequently, he wrote the three plays assessed here – El mayor general hablara de teogonia (The Major General Will Speak on Theogony, 1957), Medea en el espejo (Medea in the Mirror, 1959), and La noche de los asesinos (The Night of the Assassins, 1964) – as contemporary pieces in the tragic mode.

Cut-throat or Mocking-bird: of Condé’s Renewals

A few years ago Maryse Conde declared tongue-in-cheek: think I've somewhat lost power to displease. It's something I miss. (1) Pleasing or displeasing at her own leisure, her work is by now unsurpassed in scope as a fiction monument originating in Francophone Caribbean. In past fifteen years, her work has taken a distinct turn towards playful irony and exuberant narration. Conde has underscored on several occasions that she has been misread when taken too seriously, referring specifically to her most popular novel on US campuses, I, Tituba, Black Witch of Salem. She confided having had a lot of fun inventing Tituba's adventures, despite powerful indictment of slavery and racism and sexism this novel constitutes. Indeed, to make Tituba meet a very pregnant Hester Prynne in jail and to suggest passionate feelings between them, to show Tituba in sunset telling a tale to Hester's unborn child, then to suicide this feminist Hester by hanging, in order to protect her child from a sexist puritanical world--thus crediting Hester with despair and determination of an infanticidal slave--, these narrative components illustrate dominant mood of Conde's later novels. Conde commented on Tituba for Francoise Pfaff, a Tituba who gets herself impregnated by an adolescent before hanging from a tope, and who, naturally, survives in ghost form: since I am not one to create models, I eagerly made sure to destroy anything that might be found exemplary in Tituba's story, and in end I showed her rather naive, and at times ludicrous. (2) Of Conde's transgressive mode of story-spinning, a recent novel is most exemplary. Celanire cou-coupe (Cut-throat Celanire) can and should be taken seriously at various levels, but here Conde has made sure she would not again be misread. She told another interviewer: the only means for us, as a black nation--although I have said on several occasions this word does not mean all that much is to distance ourselves from our history, to be able to laugh about our history and to acknowledge components of it that we can attribute to our personal or collective responsibility. I don't think one should see world in black and white. (3) Several critics have already shown novelist's strategies of distancing used in various ways in earlier works. Leah Hewitt underlined how Conde, in The Last of African Kings, resists temptation to reassure or seduce distinct constituencies of readers: Africans, Creoles, African-American women, and other repressed, marginalized groups. (4) In her very first novel, Heremakhonon (1976), Conde was already mistreating dominant narrative scheme of quest for roots and return to Africa; already baring teeth of a gnashing irony that purports to debunk received ideas. She was already using female sexuality to question conventions of novelistic discourse where sexuality was traditionally inexplicit. There were always already forms of transgression in Conde's discourse: Veronica's hyper-sexuality and that of her sister in joyful bitchery (soeur en putainerie), Adama, were risky stereotypes in context of an Afrocentric identity quest. Nor was it a simple indiscretion to put in mouth of her protagonist following remark about African political figures: To possess white man's riches (the colonized is envious, Fanon said so) and their blonde women. The blonde woman is black man's dream, everybody knows that. (5) This sort of sally at expense of her heroes will be cultivated by other scandal-prone women writers; not least among them, Calixthe Beyala takes pride in her bad genre/gender (mauvais genre). Not all of Conde's novels push reader around to same extent as do characters of Tituba witch or Celanire cut-throat cut-throat. Not all of her protagonists charm us into first-degree, comfortable, and erroneous interpretations. Some narratives are seriously dominated by somber or tragic mode along with in-depth reflection on socio-political questions. …

Soyinka, Euripides, and the Anxiety of Empire

��� he old Aristotelian derivation of the word t r a g e d y as a goat-song was given a graphic endorsement, at the dawn of the postcolonial African dramatic history, by the Nigerian poet-playwright John Pepper Clark. Newly graduated from University College, Ibadan—a colonial institution, w h e re the old European classics were taken quite as seriously as in their home base—Clark produced and later published his first play, Song of a G o a t, demonstrating, “in title and action, that a tragic mode might be as indigenously African as it was Greek” (Wren 42; Ferguson 5). Central to this drama, which explores the counterplay of impotence and fertility in a traditional family, is the role of a goat. The original Nigerian production of the play (1962) called for the slaughter of a goat as a communal rite. When, however, the play was produced at the Commonwealth Festival of the Arts in London in 1965, cultural diff e re n c e s dictated the replacement of the Nigerian example with a milder but not much more successful alternative. “A rather lively goat, another practical mistake,” Wole Soyinka says in his critique of this production, “tended to punctuate passages of intended solemnity with bleats from one end and something else from the other” (M y t h 45). Although Abiola Irele, in a recent discussion of the play, does not consider the theme of sexuality central to it (xlii), the liaison between the wife (Ibiere) and her bro t h e r- i n - l a w ( Tonye), which drives her impotent husband (Zifa) to suicide, clearly suggests, as I have argued elsewhere (“Understanding African Marriage”), that such subliminal drives may be even more central to the playwright’s purposes than the well advertised dictates of traditional custom. At any rate this c o n v e rgence of the sexual and the sacrificial, in a play which openly advertises its ties with the European classics, neatly pre f i g u res Wole Soyinka’s own exploration of the same themes in his adaptation of Euripides’s Dionysian p l a y. I have chosen to see Soyinka’s eff o rt as a translation of culture, not of text: since he worked from previously published translations by Murray and A rrowsmith (as he tells us in a pre f a t o ry note), he has obviously given as much of his energy to re c o n s t ructing the ethnos (no less than the ethos) of the play as to manipulating the language of it. It would there f o re make sense to see Soyinka’s eff o rt within such contexts of understanding of cultural translation as those articulated by scholars as diverse (in generational t e rms) as Reuben Brower and James Cliff o rd . In his examination of the successive fortunes of Aeschylus’s A g a m e m n o n , B rower states: “Translation forcibly reminds us of the obvious fact that when we read, we read from a particular point in space and time” (173). In more recent times, Cliff o rd has been concerned with the value of ethnographic works in terms of the claims they make about re p resenting other culture s . His point that “the maker . . . of ethnographic texts cannot avoid expre s s i v e

Caricature without Finesse: Ionesco's Return to Broadway

A Ithough the rich dramatic oeuvre of Eugene Ionesco, one of the greatest playwrights of the second half of the twentieth century, and the creator of a new tragic mode which I have called metaphysical farce, is constantly performed all over Europe, and even in Asia and the Middle East, he has not had a Broadway production for almost forty years. As to The Chairs, it was given its English-language premiere at London's Royal Court, with Joan Plowright in the role of the Old Woman, and was eventually brought to the Phoenix Theatre in New York. One of the

The Function of 'the tragic' in Henry Reynolds' Narratives of Contact History

This paper discusses the ways in which ideas of ‘the tragic’ function in recent narratives of contact history in Australia. ‘Contact history’ is used here to refer to first and second generation contact between Aboriginal people and the European invaders in Australia in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and I shall be primarily concerned with those historical narratives which attempt to ‘re-write’ history to include Aboriginal responses during this period. Within Australian historiography this project is said to have commenced in the 1970s, prompted by wider events in the Australian community such as the Aboriginal land rights movement (Curthoys 1983, 99). One of the best-known contributors to this project of inclusion has been Henry Reynolds, now the author of eight books dedicated to it. I shall be examining two of Reynolds' most recent contributions to this area: With the White People (1990) and The Fate of a Free People (1995). At the same time that Reynolds and other professional historians have engaged in this project, there has been an increasing body of work by Aboriginal writers — much of it classified as fiction rather than academic historiography — examining these same themes of initial contact and resistance to invasion. In order to clarify some of my arguments about the function of the tragic mode in Reynolds' work, I shall also discuss a recently published short story by the Aboriginal writer, Gerry Bostock.

Aspectes de la persona tràgica en Salvador Espriu

Partly inspired by Miguel de Unamuno and partly by Ramón del Valle-Inclán, Salvador Espriu (1913-1985), the most important poet of the Catalan Civil War generation, developed his own version of the tragic mode. Throughout Espriu's entire literary work, this mode emerges in the multiple development of the "I/You symbiosis". The "I" represents the author's highest level of consciousness, transformed into the essential epiphany of Espriu's persona; the "You" is the complementary other, linked to the "I" in an indissoluble existential duality. Espriu shows that the "I/You" duality is often of contradicting nature: It explains itself as a dialectic with metaphysical depths and far-reaching ethical and theological implications. Ultimately, Espriu proves that literature in general and theater in particular are a direct projection of what Unamuno would call the "tragic meaning of life." Tragedy – in the various aspects examined by this study – is Espriu's original representation of existence itself.

Dramatizing the Failure to Jump the Culture/Nature Gap: The Films of Peter Greenaway

Dramatizing the Failure to Jump the Culture/Nature Gap: The Films of Peter Greenaway Vernon Gras (bio) Peter Greenaway’s films share the absurdist premises of Beckett and Pinter but not their minimalist understatement and choked up silences. He likes to do “talkie” films and stuffs them as full of information and citations of past culture as the film’s problem or conflict will allow. Similar to other postmodern artists whose works are informed by the current “loss of center,” Greenaway’s films are filled with quotes and allusions to the cultural monuments of the past in architecture, painting, sculpture, landscape, scientific theory, religion, and myth. He has been criticized by some as an elitist for the heavy load of intellectual freight his films carry. But many critical reactions to his work have been profuse in their admiration of its multilayered richness. 1 In an interview with Joel Siegel in City Paper (April 6, 1990), Greenaway argues that his many cultural allusions are not affectation. Rather, he feels, they help in the development of an introspective approach to film making. He grants that cinema must be realistic, that is, reproduce the external world, but it must also render a multilayer of metaphorical meaning. Thus, Greenaway’s films are far richer in their mise-en-scène than in montage. More attention is given to how a particular scene is framed and shot than to fast cuts, changing camera angles, and the suspenseful development of a story line. The latter he contemptuously refers to as “the Hollywood cinema” and a “St. Vitus Dance use of the camera.” 2 In defending his financially successful The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover from being a Hollywood sellout, Greenaway asserted that “this is a metaphorical film. There’s no way that the American cinema ever deals in metaphor. The only decent metaphorical filmmaker you have here is David Lynch. Americans don’t understand what metaphor in cinema is about. They’re extremely good at making straightforward, linear narrative movies which entertain superbly. But they very rarely do anything else. The whole purpose of my cinematic effort is to explore metaphor and symbol.” 3 It is precisely this thick visual and verbal texture in his films that induces pleasurable anticipation in his followers and perhaps contributes more to the viewer’s interpretive interest than do the storyline of his [End Page 123] characters. With confirmed regularity, Greenaway places his dramatic conflicts into a thick cultural tapestry whose allegorical meanings and oppositions, though enlivened by the surface activities of his characters, usually do more for his films than does the plot. I’m looking for ways of structuring films that coexist with my thematic material but that also have their own identities and interest. In some ways my films are more satisfactorily explained by the esthetic one brings to painting than to movies. The sense of distance and contemplation they require has much more to do with painting. When you go into an art gallery you don’t emote, by and large, like people do in the movies. I know my work is accused of being cool and intellectually exhibitionistic. But I’m determined to get away from that manipulated, emotional response that you’re supposed to have to Hollywood cinema. 4 The recurring allegory, metaphor, or subtext in all his films, underlying their more immediate and superficial action, is the inevitable failure of whatever ordering principles his protagonists engage in. The same self-awareness and reflexivity about their art found in writers like Borges, Calvino, Barth, and Pynchon, find thematic and cinematographic expression in Greenaway. On more than one occasion, Greenaway has admitted fondness for Borges, Calvino, Smollett, and their influence on his work. 5 Like many postmodern writers, Greenaway makes the creative process itself the main issue in his films. It is human creativity, the artistic activity itself—meaning giving—that functions sub voce as the hero. Excluding Prospero’s Books, Greenaway’s major films have depicted this theme as serious actions in a tragic mode. Beginning with The Draughtsman’s Contract (1982) and continuing unabated through A Zed and Two Noughts (1985), Belly of an Architect (1987), Drowning by Numbers (1988...

American-East Asian Relations in the Heroic and Whig Modes

Sir Herbert Butterfield would say that the historiography of American-East Asian relations is passing through the heroic mode of interpretation into the whig mode but has not yet advanced into the tragic mode.1 According to Professor Butterfield, historical interpretations pass through these three (mainly logical, though also chronological) stages of development. In the first, the great event tends to remain alive in historical writings, primarily because, he says, the historians themselves remain deeply engaged in the moment. A shift in historians' angle of vision marks the onset of the whig stage of historical interpretation. Sir Herbert says they begin talking about fresh perspectives. They become less partisan and search for neutral ground. The heroic fades; people seem less important than the great, impersonal forces of history. They tend to discover the future in the past. Third- and fourth-generation historians are the ones who usually write in the tragic mode. Interpretations in this mode are characterized by their comprehensiveness and breadth of sympathy. None of the five books here under review falls into this third category. Three fall wholly or partially within the first—Robert P. Newman's biography of Owen Lattimore, Wesley M. Bagby's book on American diplomacy during the Pacific war, and the essays of several contributors to the volume edited by Priscilla Roberts. Two are whig interpretations—Arthur Power Dudden's fine survey and Harry Harding's excellent monograph of contemporary Sino-American relations.

Beyond the Frontier: Writers, Western Regionalism and a Sense of Place (review)

Reviewed by: Beyond the Frontier: Writers, Western Regionalism and a Sense of Place Richard H. Cracroft Harold P. Simonson . Beyond the Frontier: Writers, Western Regionalism and a Sense of Place. Fort Worth: Texas Christian UP, 1989. 192 pp. $15.95. Taking as his point of departure the classic though not unassailed frontier thesis of Frederick Jackson Turner, that the American frontier, seemingly forever and "vaguely realizing westward," contributed immensely and positively to the shaping of American consciousness, Harold P. Simonson explores, in Beyond the Frontier: Writers, Western Regionalism and a Sense of Place, the tragic implications for Americans in the closing (circa 1890) of that idyllic and archetypal West. In an uneven, sometimes repetitive but altogether intriguing book, Simonson probes the impact, first of the open and then of the closed frontier, on writers of American fiction and concludes by attempting a synthesis of the polarities of western optimism and tragedy in what he calls "the experience of place." In "The Open Frontier" section of his three-fold study, Simonson reconsiders the pre-1890 American West as the mythic embodiment of the promise of America. Although he fails to support his interesting assertion that Turner underwent a "private agony" parallel to that of Henry Adams, "in seeing the American Dream change into something more violent than he had earlier envisioned," [End Page 586] Simonson uncovers in Turner an aesthetic vision remarkably similar to Henry David Thoreau's and demonstrates how Turner drew upon this innate Transcendentalism to endow the American West with an epoch-like mythic quality, whose visionary frontiersmen responded to the ideals of individualism, competitiveness, and democracy, which he saw as inherent in the American westering experience. Searching for literary examples of the American Dream, Simonson makes a curious sidetrip into the Romantic consciousness of John Muir, who, despite undergoing spiritual rejuvenation and rebirth in the Alaskan and Yosemite wilderness, missed seeing the American West "as the archetype of America, and the so-called western experience as the American's apotheosis"—which apotheosis the Indian, the Mountain Man, the Beat poets, and the flower child as well as William Everson (in his important book Archetype West: The Pacific Coast As a Literary Region [1976]) did not miss, and together keep alive the apotheostic impulse of the idyllic West. In "The Closed Frontier" section of the book, however, Simonson examines the tragic implications for the American artist of the closing of the frontier. He illustrates the disillusioned American writer's shift to the tragic mode in Mark Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn; Ole Rölvaag's trilogy, Giants in the Earth (1927), Peder Victorious (1929), and Their Fathers' God (1931); and in Nathanael West's The Day of the Locust (1939). Simonson breaks with Twain critics in insisting, convincingly, that Huckleberry Finn is a dark tragedy that centers on the irony that Huck must practice deceit on himself and others in order to achieve his free and simple life, which turns out to be neither—and never will be. Simonson's fresh reading lends new depth to Huck and a literary integrity to the controversial last twelve chapters of the book, which are grounded in a "prisons" metaphor full of resonances for the whole novel. Rölvaag's trilogy likewise focuses, Simonson asserts, not on man's epic accomplishment in the West but on the tragedy of what Henry Steele Commager calls "earth's humbling of man." And West's The Day of the Locust centers on a doomed and frenetic California where, forced to paste an artificial rainbow across a faded frontier, Americans confront in an "apocalyptic holocaust" the consequences of the frontier's closing, a doomsday prefigured by Mark Twain in the horrific ending of A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court (1889) and by Henry Adams in the The Education of Henry Adams (1907). In his concluding section, "Frontier Synthesis," Simonson attempts to give his reader reassurance and hope—and a non-poststructural closure of tension between the open and closed frontier. He proposes that modern American western regionalism may span the poles of tragedy and possibility, apotheosis and eschatology, by creating a special sense of rootedness in a home place "that one can...

Faustian Athletes? Sports as a Theme in Modern German Literature

Faustian Athletes? Sports as a Theme in Modern German Literature Allen Guttmann (bio) I German critics have repeatedly wondered that sports, an important part of modern culture, have not appeared as a major theme in literature.1 If one considers American literature and European literature other than that written in German, one realizes that the wonder is somewhat misplaced. Sports have been a major theme in twentieth-century literature. Within Germanic bounds, however, the critics are closer to the mark. There have been sports-related works by writers of repute, but they are fewer than in American, British, or French literature. The number of such works is less interesting, however, than the fact that they tend to focus on a single theme: failure. The athletes who appear in modern German literature are driven men, striving with an intensity and passion conventionally referred to as Faustian. They inhabit "the kingdom of endless struggle," and they pursue impossible goals (Torberg 141). They are rarely team players whose success depends on skillful cooperation. They are more likely to be loners—willful [End Page 21] runners and swimmers who seek obsessively to overcome "the weakness and reason of the body" (Johnson 199). They need "repeatedly to determine, as the limits [of the possible] shift, how the body is capable of releasing further reserves" (Blatter 180). That these fictional athletes usually fail in their quests is another reason to associate them with the Faustian prototype, an association strengthened by the fact that most of the athletes of German sports fiction are morally flawed. When they are not doomed by their authors to symbolic defeat on the track or in the pool, their faulty characters sully their athletic triumphs. They wear their laurels with a grimace. The theme of sports is not wholly subsumed within the tragic mode. It occasionally appears as satire, gentle as in Friedrich Dürrenmatt's flimsy novel, Grieche Sucht Griechin (1966), acerbic as in Bodo Kirchoff's play, Body-Building (1980). What one seldom finds are works like Yves Gibeau's La Ligne Droite (1956) or Alan Sillitoe's Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner (1959), where sports are a vehicle for the protagonist's moral triumph. Kurt Grasshoff's assertion that American sports fiction has "predominantly pessimistic tendencies" might better have been directed at German versions of the genre (126). These generalizations, exceptions to which will be acknowledged, also apply surprisingly well to popular fiction, such as Hans Blickensdörfer's Pallmann (1984), and to essays on sports written by German men of letters, such as those collected in Der Querschnitt's famous June, 1932, issue, which was wholly devoted to sports as "the world religion of the twentieth century" (Seiffer 385). Although the theme of sports in German literature is, as Effie Briest's father might have said, ein weites Feld, I shall focus on seven novels that have some claim to literary significance. II John Henry Mackay has been forgotten by most Germanisten, but this son of a Scots father and a German mother wrote what is probably the paradigmatic novel of the genre. Der Schwimmer (1901) is the story of Franz Felder, the athletically gifted child of poor Berliners. Mackay's depiction of the fourteen-year-old Felder is typographically as well as substantively poetic: He swam, and he never tired.He dove, and his narrow breast widened effortlessly.He swam and swam, where and when he could.—It was a hot summer, a long summer, a summer full of work.But it was nonetheless a summer full of joy. (7: 43) The talented young swimmer is recruited into the socially exclusive Schwimmklub Berlin von 1879, trains in the club's pool, and becomes, [End Page 22] at the age of eighteen, national champion over 1000 meters. His character changes. "Something determined and hard entered his being" (7: 160). Spectacular national and international triumphs cease to suffice. "Like a drinker whose thirst increases with every glassful, he thirsted for new and greater successes" (7: 170). Having defeated all rival swimmers, he arrogantly demands that the club make him the sole entry in the divers' competition. Although he has practiced in secret and become a surprisingly good diver...

The Tragic Mode of Seneca's Troades

Titles count for something. When conferred upon poems and plays they have the capacity both to rouse and to control the expectations of potential readers and spectators. You buy tickets to a performance of the Antigone only to find when you take your seat that it is a modern comedy; whether you are furious or whether you are amused, you are at least surprised. The titles of literary works have implications; they may be designed to entice, to intrigue, to whet the appetite, to shock. Giving something a name enables it to be spoken about as a distinct entity; giving a text a name may also imply some particular fully or partially defined purpose or character. But while titles sometimes describe, they can also mislead. To the minds of critics, titles are apt to suggest certain issues and questions for consideration, but may also tend to discourage the consideration of other issues and questions of equal or even greater importance.

The Second Maiden’s Tragedy ed. by Anne Lancashire

366 Comparative Drama sense in terms of explaining motivation in The Master Builder and Hedda Gabler. Schwarz is equally impressive in his analysis of Arthur Miller. His sympathetic study of After the Fall bears looking into, for this is one of the few critics who accepts the work on its own terms and is no longer searching for these to be something else. Schwarz’s thematic approach (“Man as Agent and Victim,” “Tragic Theaters of the Will,” and “The Devaluation of Life”) raises significant questions of methodology when applied to European drama since World War II. His categorizations of “tragic modes” skillfully encompass much of the vitality of existential playwrights like Camus and Sartre, yet seem woefully inadequate in delineating the dramatic energy of Beckett or the sheer theatricality of Tom Stoppard. From Büchner to Beckett may miss the rich realm of theatrical style, but when it addresses itself to a careful consideration of hero and idea, its impact is always directly on target. ENOCH BRATER University of Michigan The Second Maiden’s Tragedy. Ed. Anne Lancashire. The Revels Plays. Manchester and Baltimore: Manchester Univ. Press and Johns Hop­ kins Univ. Press, 1978. Pp. xx + 317. $16.00. Anne Lancashire’s Revels edition of The Second Maiden’s Tragedy is a first-rate job of editing a third-rate anonymous play that has survived only in a manuscript of first-rate interest to students of the early theater and dramatic texts. It is not surprising to find another first-rate job of editing in the Revels Plays, but it is surprising to find this particular play there, since previous volumes have usually contained the best and best-known dramas of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The Gen­ eral Editor, F. David Hoeniger, explains that the series will include not only “well-known plays but also . . . some of the lesser known of whose merit as literature and as drama [the editors] are convinced” (p. ix). Many readers will probably not agree that this play has sufficient merit. The MS, which has been in the British Museum since 1807 and was first edited in 1824, is a prompt book arranged for production by the King’s Men. On the last page of text is the license signed by the Master of the Revels, Sir George Buc, approving the play for public perform­ ance; the license is dated 31 October 1611 and calls the play (otherwise untitled) “This Second Maydens tragedy.” Buc’s hand appears at least twice in the text, toning down comments about great men and about regicide. There are additions on separate slips of paper by the original scribe and many cuts and alterations in the speeches by two or more other persons. The book-keeper and prompter of the King’s Men is doubtless responsible for sixteen added stage directions. For anyone in­ terested in the vicissitudes of a Jacobean play text on its way to perform­ ance, there is much detail here, and the editor provides an informative discussion of censorship of seven kinds (pp. 275-80), as well as lists of other corrections. Evidently written in 1610-11, The Second Maiden’s Tragedy has Reviews 367 been attributed to Thomas Goffe, George Chapman, William Shake­ speare, Philip Massinger, John Webster, Cyril Tourneur, and Thomas Middleton; only Chapman, Tourneur, and Middleton are considered seriously today, and the last is clearly the favorite. The main action is the deposition, imprisonment, and final victory of the protagonist Govianus over the Tyrant and the rivalry of the two men for the Lady. After the Lady has killed herself rather than submit to the Tyrant, the latter takes her corpse from its tomb to his chamber. The Lady’s Spirit (played by the boy actor Richard Robinson, according to a marginal note in the MS) appears to Govianus asking him to restore her body to the tomb. Govianus paints the corpse’s face with poison, and when the Tyrant kisses it, he dies. Finally the corpse is returned to the tomb attended by Govianus and the Lady’s Spirit. In the secondary action (adapted from Cervantes’ Don Quixote) Govianus’ brother Anselmus distrusts his wife and persuades his reluc­ tant friend Votarius...

Book Reviews

Book reviewed in this articleThe Anglo‐Saxon Age c, 400‐1042. [Volume III of A History of England.] By D. J. V. Fisher. (New York: Longman, 1974. Pp. x, 374. $10.50.)Islam Under the Crusaders. By Robert Jgnatius Burns, S. J.The Vision of Politics on the Eve of the Reformation: More, Machiavelli, and Seyssel. By J. H. Hexter.The City of Worcester in the Sixteenth Century. By Alan D. Dyer.Sweden's Age of Greatness, 1632‐1718. Edited, with an introduction, by Michael Roberts.A History of the Swedish People: From Renaissance to Revolution, By Vilhelm Moberg. Translated from the Swedish by Paul Britten Austin.The Attack on‘Feudalism’in Eighteenth‐Century France. By J. Q. C. Mackrell. Politics and Belief in Contemporary France – Emmanuel Mounier and Christian Democracy, 1932‐1950. By R. William Rauch, Jr.Statesmen at War: The Strategy of Overthrow, 1798‐1799. By Piers Mackesy.Revolutionary Politics in the Long Parliament. By John R. MacCormack.Chartism. By J.T. Ward.George Joachim Goschen: The Transformation of a Victorian Liberal. By Thomas J. Spinner, Jr.Between Science and Religion: The Reaction to Scientific Naturalism in Late Victorian England. By Frank Miller Turner.Engels, Manchester, and the Working Class. By Steven Marcus.The American Problem in British Diplomacy, 1841‐1861. By Wilbur Devereux Jones.War Machinery and High Policy: Defence Administration in Peacetime Britain, 1902‐1914. By Nicholas &Dombrain.Generalissimo Churchill. By R. W. Thompson.Sword and Pen, A Survey of the Writings of Sir Winston Churchill. By Manfred Weidhorn.The Conservative Party, 1918‐1970. By T. F. Lindsey and Michael Harrington.Modern Italy: A Topical History. Edited, with an introduction, by Edward R. Tannenbaum and Emiliana P. Noether.The Seizure of Power: Fascism in Italy 1919‐1929. By Adrian Lyttelton.The Von Richthofen Sisters: The Triumphant and the Tragic Modes of Love, By Martin Green. New York: Basic Books, Inc, 1974. Pp. 388. $10.95.)The End of Austria‐Hungary. By Leo Valiani.The Anschluss Question in the Weirnar Era: A Study of Nationalism in Germany and Austria, 1918‐1932. By Stanley Suval.Hitler's Strategy, 1940‐1941; The Balkan Clue. By Martin L. Van Creveld.Hitler and His Generals: The Hidden Crisis, January‐June, 1938. By C. Deutsch.Hitler's War Aims. Volume II, The Establishment of the New Order. By Norman Rich.Codeword Barbarossa. By Barton Whaley.The Faithful Shepherd: A History of the New England Ministry in the Seventeenth Century. By David D. Hall.Frontier Elements in a Hudson River Village. By Carl Nordstrom.Fame and the founding Fathers. Essays by Douglass Adair. Edited and with an Introduction by H. Trevor Colbourn, A Personal Reminiscence by Caroline Robbins, and a Historiographical Essay by Robert E. Shalhope.The Loyalists in Revolutionary America, 1760‐1781. By Robert McCluer Calhoon.Roots of the Republic: A New Perspective on Early American Constitutionalism. By George Dargo.Black Majority: Negroes in Colonial South Carolina, From 1670 through the Stono Rebellion. By Peter H. Wood.Blacks in Bondage: Letters of American Slaves. Edited by Robert S. Starobin.The Segregation Struggle in Louisiana, 1862‐1877. By Roger A. Fischer.A History of American City Government, Vols. I & II. By Ernest S. Griffith.Arming the Union, Small Arms in the Union Army. By Carl L. Davis.Free Men All: The Personal Liberty Laws of the North 1180‐1861. By Thomas D. Morris.Held Captive by Indians: Selected Narratives, 1642‐1836. Edited by Richard Van Der Beets.White into Red: A Study of the Assimilation of White Persons Captured by Indians. By J. Norman Heard.The American Territorial System. Edited by John Porter Bloom.Destiny Road: The Gila Trail and the Opening of the Southwest. By Odie B. FaulkMakers of American Diplomacy: From Benjamin Franklin to Henry Kissinger. Edited by Frank J. Merli and Theodore A. Wilson.Emissaries to a Revolution: Woodrow Wilson's Executive Agents in Mexico. By Larry D. Hill.American Policy and the Division of Germany: The Clash with Russia over Reparations. By Bruce Kuklick.The Cold War. By Hugh Higgins.Reflections on the Cold War: A Quarter Century of American Foreign Policy. Edited by Lynn H. Miller and Ronald W. Pruessen.The Democratic Party and the Politics of Sectionalism, 1941‐1948. By Robert A. Garson.Truman, the Jewish Vote, and the Creation of Israel. By John Snetsinger,The Politics of Turmoil: Essays on Poverty, Race and the Urban Crisis. By Richard A. Cloward and Frances Fox Piven.The History of Childhood. Edited by Lloyd deMause.Albert Shaw of the “Review of Reviews”: An Intellectual Biography. By Lloyd J. Graybar.The University of Kansas: A History. By Clifford S. Griffin.Adelaide and the Country 1870‐1917: Their Social and Political Relationship. By J. B. Hirst.Latin America: From Dependence to Revolution. Edited by James Petras.APRISMO: The Ideas and Doctrines of Victor Raúl Haya de la Torre. Selceted, edited, and translated by Robert J. Alexander.The Brazilian Communist Party: Conflict and Integration, 1922‐1972. By Ronald H. Chilcote.Sugar Slavery: An Economic History of the British West Indies 1623‐1775. By Richard B. Sheridan.Ho Chi Minh: A Biographical Introduction. By Charles Fenn.

Toward a Theory of Dramatic Literature for a Technological Age

Teachers and scholars seem always to have experienced some critical discomfiture in dealing critically with that mode of artistic production we call drama or play. It is, of course, literature. But then again, of course, it isn't. The debate which surrounds this paradoxical hybrid is at least as old as Aristotle, and we may derive from fragmentary and often oracular Poetics some notion of how this problem was seen in classical times. Though Aristotle pays extremely careful attention to constituent parts of a play in performance and indeed bases his definition of tragic mode on his perception of a theatre audience's response to play form, he goes on to add, For power of Tragedy, we may be sure, is felt even apart from and actors. The tone of this remark suggests that Aristotle is but carefully noting an to what he understands as norm: play in theatre with representation and actors. Yet, several chapters later, pursuing this exception Aristotle notes that the plot ought to be so constructed that, even without aid of eye, he who hears tale told will thrill with horror and melt to pity at what takes place. This is impression we should receive from hearing story of Oedipus. Here again, however, Aristotle goes on to suggest that it is in playing that tragic piece achieves its full psychological impact. Though one can simply hear or read Oedipus, play, he seems to say, is a gestalt designed to yield its full effect only when all roles are well acted and when all of its constituent scenic parts work in harmony together.