Tragic Perspective Research Articles

At the origins of the Norwegian detective: Murder in Maurits Christopher Hansen’s prose

This article discusses the function of the murder motif in M. C. Hansen’s prose. It shows that this motif is strongly related to the author’s quest for novel ways to represent reality, his ambition to portray the private lives of everyday Norwegians, and his goal to illustrate the moral development — or, on the contrary, the degeneration — of his characters. A crucial plot-forming device, the motif of murder is frequently combined with the motif of insanity as retaliation for the committed crime. It is possible to see how a critical view of modernity gradually replaces the distinct religious pathos of Hansen’s early prose (Den gale Christian (The Mad Christian), Keadan, eller Klosterruinen (Keadan, or the Abbey Ruins), Novellen (The Short Story), Den myrdede brudgom (The Murdered Groom)), inevitably leading to the emergence of a new kind of hero. The nature of this hero is determined by the surroundings and environment, the narrative becomes more psychologizing, and the interest in daily life takes the place of the theme of the moral revival (Jutulskoppen (The Troll Mountain) and Mordet på Maskinbygger Roolfsen (The Murder of Engine Maker Roolfsen)). Hansen’s writings from this time period are distinguished by a tragic perspective. The notion of a moral revival of man loses its appeal to the author. He feels that profit and vanity have replaced love, and that true feelings are doomed to vanish. The themes of mistrust between close people, the corruption of the ruling class, the oppressed position of the people, and the inability to escape from social oppression take on a new significance. We discover that Hansen’s interest in the everyday and private lives of regular people is linked to his search for artistic research tools, whereas the motifs of murder and crime investigation aid the writer in creating a vivid and accurate picture of contemporary Norwegian society while also making his narratives more entertaining.

아리스토텔레스의 비극 관점에서 『더버빌가의 테스』 읽기

Reading Tess of the D’urbervilles in Aristotle’s Perspective on Tragedy. The New Studies of English Language & Literature 83 (2022): 25-44. Aristotle believed that good drama should aim to improve the audience morally and ethically. He presented rich examples of how special types of people react to specific situations in his Poetics. In order to raise the audience’s response to the maximum, the actual elements of the play were selected and the effective structure and operation of techniques were explained. The tragedy of Thomas Hardy’s Tess of D’urbervilles was discussed mainly with the effect of social circumstances on the protagonist. If we look at the tragic nature of Tess of D’urbervilles, we can find a significant similarity with the attitude of Aristotle, who tried to find order in life through death. In this paper, I attempted to read Tess’s tragic elements in comparison with Aristotle’s tragic perspective. Rather than tragedies caused by external circumstances, I tried to find clues about the transmission of ancient tragedies of Thomas Hardy by focusing on the flaws or mistakes of Tess’s individual.

The tragic complexity of Purgatory

The text is part of a broader study on the perception of tragic perspective compared with our contemporary tragic sense. In addition to have a particular narratological relevance, the persistence of tragic level in the second cantica of the Comedy produces a decisive effect in Dante’s discourse, and proposes a different meaning of Allegory. One of the results of this investigation concerns the dramatic language, which is determined where Dante’s allegorical representation takes place, whereas the Allegory itself is forbidden by the variables of the tragic discourse, and is impossible to realize. However, the tragic perspective of the second Cantica is not constant, as in Hell, and it has its specific climax, marked by the acceleration of the time, the space of waiting, the crisis of salvific destiny, wich, in the arc od Dante’s narration, bind the characters to doubt and to need to overcome the tragic and irresolvable condition of being without destiny.

ASPECTOS DISCURSIVOS E SOCIOIDEOLÓGICOS NO POEMA “PROMETEU”, DE GOETHE: UMA CONTRAPALAVRA À TRAGÉDIA GREGA

ABSTRACT This study aims to discuss discursive and socio-ideological aspects in Goethe’s poem Prometheus , from the dialogical perspective of language, observing how it is configured as a counterword to the Greek tragedy Prometheus . For in such a way, we find theoretical and methodological endorsement in the thought of Bakhtin (2006a, 2006b [1979]; 2010 [1930-34]), Medviédev (2016a, 2016b [1928]), Volóchinov (2017 [1929]) and Benjamin (2018), which subsidize the research. Using a dialogical approach, we delimited as locus of the study the poem entitled Prometheus , authored by Goethe. From the moment when we understand the poem by Goethe as a counterword, it is possible to glimpse a change of conception in the construction of the character, resulting of discursive interactions between Prometheus and Zeus. In addition, there is a process of discontinuance of the mythical narrative, since Goethe’s perspective reveals dialogues with the German sociopolitical system between the 18th and 19th centuries. It is, therefore, considered a research of qualitative and interpretative matrix. The results had pointed to the fact that the points of view of Goethe, in his work-statement (BAKHTIN, 2006d [1979]), differentiate of the tragic perspective visualized in the Myth of Prometheus , where the character has become a slave and had perpetual punishment.

James Baldwin and the politics of white identity

Efforts to develop a coherent role for white people in racial justice initiatives in the USA are often stymied by the defensiveness, paternalism, and guilt of many white liberals. Such efforts are also undermined by critiques of whiteness that conflate white identity and white supremacy. I address this dilemma by developing an account of antiracist white identity politics, conceived of here as taking responsibility for the effects of being socially defined as white. I locate conceptual resources for this project in James Baldwin’s reflections on tragedy, love, and identity. In contrast to those who invoke Baldwin to argue for abolishing white identity, I make a case for politicizing it. I draw on Baldwin’s articulation of a tragic sensibility to argue that white antiracism requires accepting a morally compromised identity one has not chosen. It also requires accepting that serious efforts to end white supremacy inevitably lead to mistakes, misunderstandings, and counterproductive outcomes. By adopting a tragic perspective on these aspects of white antiracism, white people would become more capable of forging antiracist white identities through robust engagement in struggles for racial justice.

O PESSIMISMO E TRAGICIDADE EM AUGUSTO DOS ANJOS A PARTIR DA HISTÓRIA DA LEITURA

Augusto de Carvalho Rodrigues dos Anjos (Paraíba, 1884 - Minas Gerais, 1914) foi um escritor brasileiro, que morreu aos 30 anos de idade, mais conhecido por escrever poesias, também foi autor de crônicas. Suas poesias foram um tanto rejeitadas na época, por não corresponderem fielmente aos modelos literários vigentes, como também por tratarem de temas que a literatura brasileira dava pouco espaço. Abordando uma visão trágica da vida, Augusto dos Anjos nos motiva a indagá-lo quanto às suas leituras e absorção de ideias, sobretudo em relação à filosofia trágica. Nesta pesquisa, aprofundamo-nos no universo cultural augustiniano buscando, na estimativa de sua leitura, explicitar aspectos da obra e vida do autor, reconhecendo, ao menos em parte, as referências e influências literárias em sua obra, a partir da história da leitura, utilizando basicamente seus escritos, que nos dão vestígios dessas relações. Por meio disso, analisamos seus escritos sobre uma perspectiva pessimista e trágica, não delimitando seus pensamentos, suas práticas literárias e ideias, mas relacionando estas com as filosofias de Schopenhauer e Nietzsche, por conta de suas filosofias acerca do trágico. Parecem ser influências que conseguimos observar, sobretudo, ao ler as poesias de Augusto dos Anjos.

The Tragic Consumer: A Nietzschean Reading of Irremediably Unsatisfactory Consumption

This essay criticizes the romantic ethic of consumption (Campbell, 1987) from the tragic perspective (Nietzsche, 2006). By tragic, we refer to the constant tension between Apollo and Dionysius (Nietzsche, 2006, p. 47). It is suggested that the romantic ethic of consumption, which orders our existence, is associated with Apollonian ideals, thus, creating a protective and individuating illusion against the chaotic, the amorphous, and the contradictory—characteristics associated with the Dionysian. What has been considered as the romantic-Apollonian ethic of consumption promises to satiate our desires (Campbell, 2006), even though this is not possible since incompleteness is inherent to the individual (Freud, 1996, 1997). This ethic may prove frustrating for some consumers since the satiation of wills has a transient effect and the individual therefore remains in a state of desire. In cases like these, an alternative to the romantic meaning would be the adoption of a tragic conception of consumption, a conception consubstantiated in the knowledge of its uselessness as a strategy to recover a lost completeness. Thus, this article describes the figure of the tragic consumer, the one who knows the chaotic side of the act of consuming, but who reaffirms his or her will, either consuming—since he perceives that there is no escape from the logic imposed by consumption—or by choosing to abandon specific categories of goods that do not respond to the reiteration of his will. As a practical instance for the development of this critique, we have reflected on the phenomenon of category abandonment (Suarez & Chauvel, 2012).

The Tragic perspective in Hamlet's character during the play-scene

The Tragic perspective in Hamlet's character during the play-scene

The Dead Republic, by Roddy Doyle: The Wisdom of Comic Heroism

Roddy Doyle is a writer who has reflected that human existence is an interplay between comedy and tragedy, and that therefore all kinds of evils—fanaticism, absolutism, dogmatism—result from cultivating only the tragic perspective. This becomes obvious in The Dead Republic (2010), a novel in which Henry Smart’s comic attitude to life allows Doyle to offer the reader a detached and non-sentimental view of contemporary Irish history. Both John Ford and the IRA want to reshape Henry’s story as a Republican hero to fit their own notion of Irishness and it is precisely in Henry’s response to this perversion of Irish history, politics and national identity that he reveals himself as the perfect comic hero and debunks all efforts to mystify the past.

The Grunge Effect: Music, Fashion, and the Media During the Rise of Grunge Culture In the Early 1990s

The Grunge Effect: Music, Fashion, and the Media During the Rise of Grunge Culture In the Early 1990s

Percy Shelley and the Tragedies of Lacanian Psychoanalysis

ABSTRACTThis essay offers some new perspectives on affinities between the writing and thought of Percy Shelley and Jacques Lacan, focusing on aspects of Lacanian psychoanalysis sometimes identified as “tragic,” especially its notions of the divided subject, and of that subject’s alienation by language. It first explores parallels between these notions and Shelley’s representations of language in Julian and Maddalo. Developing this, by engaging with deconstructive and psychoanalytic approaches to history and language in “The Triumph of Life,” it then highlights how Shelley and Lacan each seem to endorse a similar pessimism, a tragic perspective on our efforts to achieve self-understanding, and on human knowledge and potential more widely. Drawing on Fredric Jameson’s reflections on Marxism and psychoanalysis, and on his interpretation of Lacan’s concept of the “Real,” the essay then concludes by bringing Shelley and Lacan into a more positive, politically energizing encounter with one another, via a reading of Prometheus Unbound.

Alegria: uma aventura em trânsito

O artigo tem como proposta analisar o tema da alegria, como uma aventura em trânsito, propondo, para isso, dois aspectos da alegria que permitem percebê-la em sua totalidade. O embate do real e irreal surge, então, a partir de uma análise da alegria em sua perspectiva trágica. Um dos aspectos trata da alegria demoníaca, como choque, colisão; e outro da alegria dançante, leve. Ambos como forças afirmativas da vida. Antelo, Molder, Lispector, Deleuze, Nietzsche, Agamben e Potkay são os autores que embasam o artigo. Cada autor, a partir de uma perspectiva sobre alegria, traz contribuições que possibilitam a reflexão acerca de uma alegria trágica, afirmativa da vida em todas as suas forças.

Arendt’s Apology

In 1967, Hannah Arendt published an essay with the deceptively simple title “Truth and Politics” (1967). Most scholarly discussions of her essay consider her distinction between a traditional political art of limited, deliberate, strategic lying and modern, organised, global lying and self-deception and then evaluate her qualified defence of the virtues of mendacity. This article suggests, however, that her essay has a much broader ambit: viz., to defend the political value of truth-telling. The main purpose of this article is to demonstrate that she formulates her essay as an apology of the truth-teller in politics and of her own truth-telling in her controversial report of the Eichmann trial. It first surveys the personal motives of Arendt’s political defence of frank speech. It shows that in developing this defence she significantly revises her scepticism about the value of truth-telling in politics. She does so by identifying three different types of truth-teller with distinctive political roles: philosophers who exemplify the truth in their own lives, citizens who see the world from other people’s perspectives, and poets and historians whose stories reconcile citizens to the past. Finally, it argues that the tragic political perspective Arendt sought to revive requires acknowledging value of the emotions in making political judgments.

A Short Psychosocial History of British Child Abuse and Protection: Case Studies in Problems of Mourning in the Public Sphere

This paper offers a historical and psychosocial account of ‘moral panics’ about child maltreatment in England over the last four decades, and proposes this perspective as additional to Munro's more systemic account of the same history. The formal child protection system is theorised in terms of an explicit and a covert dual primary task. The overt task is to actually protect vulnerable children and prevent abuse; the covert task is to protect the remainder of society from exposure to anxiety provoking ‘dangerous knowledge’ about the prevalence of child maltreatment. Episodes of public and political moral panic occur when the boundaries of containment provided by the official system and its processes are breached, propelling debate and contestation about child maltreatment into the public sphere, where public enquiries and other social mechanisms are called upon to ‘settle’ the contested issues. Sometimes these social settlements appear to be successful in resolving conflicts about the reality or otherwise of specific forms of abuse; in other cases, especially child deaths, the controversial and anxiety-laden nature of the problem is recurrently projected back into the public domain. The paper suggests that this may be associated with a difficulty about establishing a secure symbolic framework or discourse in society for the emotionally indigestible facts of child torture and murder. In turn, this may be associated with problems about the decline of public mourning rituals and the failure of the public enquiry format to facilitate this. In line with Munro, the paper argues for the importance of a tragic perspective on child maltreatment, to counter idealisations of the capacity of the formal system to protect children.

Public Life as Tragedy

AbstractSome of the most perceptive observers of public life have emphasised its tragic dimensions, not so much out of sympathy for politicians, but because the lens of tragedy offers a unique insight into the realities of the world of politics. Here I attempt to synthesise this tragic perspective by employing the comments of those best positioned to identify the salient features of public life, its primary dramatis personae. Politics occasionally provides us with the kind of spectacular catastrophe that journalists like to construe as tragedy. But our purpose is to evoke a different, more personal, less visible kind of tragedy: the small but malignant tragedies of self‐betrayal, of inflation of the ego and deflation of conscience, of helpless witness to injustice and misfortune, of status unaccompanied by power or efficacy, of the shrinking of aspiration to the scale of the practicable, of disillusion and, on occasion, of despair.

“[Un]Dazzled by the Ideal?”: Tully’s Politics and Humanism in Tragic Perspective

“[Un]Dazzled by the Ideal?”: Tully’s Politics and Humanism in Tragic Perspective

Beyond Tragedy: Hannah Arendt and Hans Morgenthau on Responsibility, Evil and Political Ethics

Hans Morgenthau claimed that a tragic perspective enables us to confront more squarely the harsh realities of politics, the evil aspects of human nature, and the ethical compromises action requires. Richard Lebow has more recently identified Morgenthau as an exemplar in making his own case for the “tragic vision.” This essay contrasts the sharp differences between Morgenthau’s and Hannah Arendt’s response to the Holocaust to challenge Morgenthau’s claim, and to illustrate the limitations of a tragic perspective. Her turn to law in confronting the problems of evil and responsibility that the Holocaust had so radically posed underscores the need to draw upon other conceptual resources beyond tragedy in our critical engagement with such issues.

Beyond Historical Tragedy: The Frankfurt School and Judeo-Christian Messianism

In "Beyond Historical Tragedy" the author compares and discusses Hegel's prescient understanding of the meaning of tragedy and how it differs from Aristotelian or quasi-Aristotelian theories. At the same time, he embarks on a critique of George Steiner's Hegelian reading of Sophocles' Antigone, and of tragedy more generally. He develops the idea that the Critical Theory of the Frankfurt School is closer to a Jewish or Christian perspective than to the tragic perspective - or to Hegel's modern version of the tragic perspective. The contrast is most clear in the way that the idea of fate is negated by Adorno, Horkheimer, Marcuse and Benjamin.

Nationalist Blackness

Nationalist Blackness Cotten Seiler (bio) Adam Green. Selling the Race: Culture, Community, and Black Chicago, 1940–1955. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006. xiv + 306 pp. Illustrations, notes, and index. $35.00. There is a delightful piece of apocrypha in which Richard Nixon, then vice president, runs into Louis Armstrong at an airport (in most versions it is Paris; in others Moscow or Tokyo or Rio) and invites the trumpeter to join him aboard Air Force Two for the flight home. Nixon is thoroughly charmed by Armstrong, with whom he chats most of the flight. "Pops, is there anything I can do for you?" Nixon asks. "Well, Mr. Vice President," replies Armstrong, who is known to keep a sizeable stash of marijuana in his trumpet case, "it would be an honor to have you hold my trumpet when we get off the plane." Nixon agrees, no doubt liking the semiotics of this act, its potential conferral of political capital and something that will soon be called "soul." So off the plane, into the terminal, and through customs stride Armstrong and Nixon, both all smiles. Outside the airport, Nixon hands back Armstrong's instrument and contraband and the two part company, each the richer for the experience. For Armstrong in this case, embracing the nation-state (literally holding on to its penultimate embodiment, Nixon) despite its ongoing legal and political subjugation of African Americans, proved an effective strategy for accomplishing his goal. It was something on which he might have reflected on the ride back to his home in Queens. We might read this legend as yet another variation on the "trickster" tale pervasive in African diasporic texts, or we may consider it as an instance of what Adam Green, in his provocative book Selling the Race, calls the "cultural initiative" of African Americans at midcentury. In Green's view, this quality consists of the capacity to improvise, to adapt, and to inflect—rather than resist—the dominant structures of American modernity. Selling the Race thus participates in what we might call the "agnostic turn" in U.S. cultural historiography since the mid-1980s. Drawing on the tradition of immanent critique found in American pragmatism, this turn looks to the dominant economic social forms of modernity for their (often accidental) progressive effects, and, perhaps more importantly, attempts to draw out the transformational potential [End Page 95] that these structures and institutions harbor, unrealized though that potential remains. Unlike the majority of left historians of the past quarter-century, who have tended to view corporate capitalism, the consumer marketplace, the crisis of autonomous subjectivity, the nation-state and civic nationalism, and liberalism itself as prohibitive of more socialist and democratic visions of human association and production, scholars aligned with this recent turn frame these entities as precursors—with all the deficiencies of the prototype—of more robustly democratic social forms yet to be built. The essence of this turn, according to James Livingston, one of its key navigators, is the deployment of a "comic" rather than a tragic perspective on corporate capitalism and the worlds it made.1 Its equal measures of ambivalence and hope toward the corporate remaking of American life distinguish this scholarship from the declension narratives of most left cultural history and from the market triumphalism advanced by a chorus of neoliberal voices both inside and outside the academy. Selling the Race is among the first studies of twentieth-century African America to follow this turn. As such it challenges, but also complements, recent work critical of liberal and market-oriented strategies for racial assertion and recognition. Nikhil Pal Singh's Black is a Country, for example, focused on midcentury black intellectuals' repudiation of American universalist ideology and search for a resistant political consciousness that would "not fold blacks back into a liberal nationalist narrative of American freedom."2 By contrast, Green emphasizes that "even as black modernism established its own terms of inquiry, much remains to be learned from the more conventional tenets of the modern, even when these fail, in part or outright, to account for human life and action beyond the European continent" (p. 3). Moreover, whereas Singh treated the construction of a supranational blackness, Green...

Taking Down the Angel (review)

writes, "I spent the early nineties trapped in a double singularity. Not only did I feel that I was dUferent than everyone around me, but I felt that the age I Uved in was utterly dUferent from any age that had come before. For me the work of regaining a tragic perspective has therefore involved a dual kind of reaching out: both the reconnection with a community of readers and writers, and the reclamation of a sense of history ." Franzen admits to "an angry and frightened isolation" (apparently in those days before The Corrections ), and he writes of his intention for the collection of essays to represent his movement "toward an acceptance —even a celebration—of being a reader and a writer." He wants to appear optimistic that the white noise of commercial clutter can be stUled, even if only for a few hours, by Uterature —that a writer and a reader can still connect. Yet he can't help but remind us that in this electronic day and consumer age, it isn't easy. Consider the final two selections in the book The first is Franzen's delightfully horrifying post-Oprah essay, "Meet Me in St. Louis," in which he recounts his return to his native city (hehasn't lived there for twenty years) with an Oprah cameraman and producer . The announcementofOprah's selection of The Corrections has not yet taken place, so the controversies exist only on the horizon, and they're attempting to tape footage that wiU capture the atmosphere of the book and the essence of the author. The essay begins with Franzen repeatedly driving slowly across a bridge that spans the Mississippi River into St. Louis, and climaxes with Franzen at his childhood home—cameras rolling—staring upward at a young oak tree the family planted after his father died and imagining how this wUl play on TV. FinaUy Franzen shouts, "This is so fundamentaUy bogus!" Franzen concludes the coUection with a brief narrative of a bus trip to Washington, D.C., in January 2001 to protest the inauguration of President George W. Bush (both for his poUcies and for the fiasco that was Horida). Written in the second person —as though Franzen couldn't quite bring himseU to admit that the person who wrote the essay was the person who rode the bus to the protest —the protagonist, if we could call him that, joins other young northeastern progressives in the cold, gray, January rain as they chant pithy slogans and enjoy a certain spUit of antiestablishment communitarianism . Then they go home. "You may stül be one version of yourseU ," Franzen concludes, "the version from the bus, the younger and redder version, as long as you're waiting for the subway and riding home. But then you peel off the thermal layers, stül damp, of the long day's costume, and you see a whoUy different kind of costume hanging in your closet; and in the shower you're naked and alone." Even after The Corrections. Even after Oprah. (SK) Taking Down the Angel by Jeff Friedman Carnegie MeUon UP, 2003, .101 pp., $12.95 Taking Down the Angel is Jeff Friedman's third book of poems. As in his previous books, Record 176 · The Missouri Review Breaking Heat Wave and Scattering the Ashes, Friedman writes in a refreshingly straightforward style that unerringly penetrates his subjects . He does not rely on complex poetic structures or exotic references to sustain his writing. In his best poems, he explores a subject through uncluttered narratives and unencumbered images. In the opening and closing poems of this book, the author's father is a central character, an icon of the American work ethic—and a disappointment . "My father died in a car accident/practicaUy penrdless/and my uncle went to sleep forever in a hotel room/hundreds of mUes from home. . . ." writes Friedman. After this sudden loss, which earlier on is perceived as abandonment, Friedman begins to find shreds, shadows, echoes ofhis father in unlikely places. The angel taken down in the book's title is his father. But the "taking down" is not a faU from heaven or from grace; it is more a recognition...