Tragic Sense Of Life Research Articles

Pity the Northrop Frye Scholar? Frye's "Anatomy of Criticism": Fifty Years After

Northrop Frye never traveled to Spain, but, being a comparativist and a polymath, he was naturally familiar with the Spanish cultural tradition, especially its art and literature. As a twenty six year old, Frye saw Picasso’s Weeping Woman at a 1938 exhibition in London, which prompted him to remark that Picasso was “one of the greatest revolutionary geniuses in Western culture” (Modern Culture 94), and one finds references throughout his work to Spanish painters other than Picasso, especially to Goya and El Greco. I think Frye’s first choice for a place to visit in Spain would have been the Altamira caves, only a couple of hours northwest of here. The Paleolithic drawings at Altamira fascinated him: they represented for him the imaginative identification with things outside the self –an absorption of human consciousness with the natural world into an undifferentiated state of archaic identity. In such a process of metaphorical identification, which he called “ecstatic metaphor,” the subject and object merge into an existential unity. Frye was also attracted to the Spanish mystical tradition, as it is found especially in St. John of the Cross. He wrote an early essay on the rationalistic mystic Ramon Lull, who hailed from Mallorca and whose first major work was written in Catalan. We know from the annotated books in Frye’s own library that he read Loyola’s Spiritual Exercises, Unamuno’s The Tragic Sense of Life, and Ortega’s What Is Philosophy? In his taxonomy of the specific forms of drama, he takes the name for the myth play from Calderon’s autos sacramentales, the international study of which is of course centered right here at the Universidad de Navarra (see http://griso.cti.unav.es). And Frye’s analysis of the eiron as an archetypal character draws on the gracioso—the scheming valet of Spanish drama as represented by, say, Figaro. Cervantes, as one might expect, appears repeatedly in Frye’s criticism: Don Quixote, which Frye first read as a twenty year old (Correspondence 1: 52), is his primary example of the comprehensive fictional form that includes the novel, the romance, and the anatomy. Frye’s most extensive commentary on Spanish literature is his 1949 essay on Don Quixote, occasioned by a new English

The tragic sense of life: Ernst Haeckel and the struggle over evolutionary thought

Prior to World War I, more people learned of evolutionary theory from the voluminous writings of Charles Darwin's foremost champion in Germany, Ernst Haeckel (1834-1919), than from any other source, including the writings of Darwin himself. But, with detractors ranging from paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould to modern-day creationists and advocates of intelligent design, Haeckel is better known as a divisive figure than as a pioneering biologist. Robert J. Richards' intellectual biography rehabilitates Haeckel, providing the most accurate measure of his science and art yet written, as well as a moving account of Haeckel's eventful life.

Nueva lectura de <i>Niebla</i>: Kierkegaard y el amor

Unamuno’s Niebla [translated into English as Mist] has been the object of many critical interpretations. Few critics have linked Mist to Kierkegaard, contending that the narrative plot of Mist was mainly influenced by Kierkegaard, and randomly pointing out coincidences between Unamuno’s novel and Kierkegaard’s works. This article quantifies the influence of Kierkegaard’s Diary of a Seducer on Mist and concludes that Kierkegaard’s novel has strong bearing on Unamuno’s The Tragic Sense of Life and Mist. The main thesis posited by Unamunuo in Niebla is here identified and found to be inspired by Kierkegaard’s Diary of a seducer: spiritual love is the true sense of life. Kierkegaard’s Diary must be regarded as the literary and philosophical source of Mist.

The Tragic Sense of Life, or We Are Left with Self : Theatrical Roots Re-Visited

Although the self is distinct from identity, this essay offers some insight into how identity is maintained—in the processes by which a self is formed, and through the actual content of the schemata that compose the self-concept. The author explains how in the 1920s utopian representations of a “new man” indicate the blank space where an aesthetic for the self can appear long before a theory of choice and commitment can exist in reality. Far from being a dramaturgical plan of action, such utopian representations disorient the elements of discourse in order to prepare the way for the appearance of something inconceivable or inexpressible within this discourse. The theatricality produced in this oppositional public sphere—like that of Max Reinhardt, Bertolt Brecht, Ernst Toller, and later by Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus—can thus be read as expressions of unfulfilled desire resisting the limitations of the present system and breaking beyond with self-defined narratives not yet realized in our everyday lives.

Josiah Royce and the Tragic Sense of Life

Josiah Royce and the Tragic Sense of Life

Engaging with Tragic Spirituality and Victim Sensibility: On the Cultural Setting of Mission in the West Today

AbstractResearchers into contemporary spirituality in Britain raise the question of a possible return of the classical tragic sense of life once displaced by Christianity. Such a sense of life renders faith incredible. This profound mission challenge shows itself especially in "tragic spirituality" and in an exalted "victim sensibility." The intrinsic relation between tragedy and victimhood is here explored. Since the experience of tragic victimhood is personally demanding it is characteristically evaded, in one of two basic ways: either by adopting a dismissive attitude, or by giving in to being overwhelmed and spiritually defeated. Both responses are destructive: the former tends to create or re-victimize victims, while the latter turns into self-destructive resentment and rage which readily creates new victims. Jesus Christ accepted the vocation of the ultimate victim who embraces radical victimhood without evasion and empowers others to do the same. Nevertheless Christians have sometimes either been dismissive of victimhood by appealing superficially to the resurrection, or have made Jesus the mere icon of tragic suffering. Western culture is now seen to foster vulnerability towards overwhelming by victimhood. This vulnerability is associated with the cultural fostering of depleted, narcissistic personalities. Such overwhelming often shows itself in rage and the search for scapegoats. The relation between overwhelming, the sacrifice of scapegoats and the sacred is now explored with attention to René Girard's writings. His discernment here of a contemporary "twofold Nietzschean heritage" is presented as a vital context for mission today, together with "scapegoating" tendencies in fundamentalist religion. In conclusion, an underlying issue is alternative understandings of "the sacred" and the ensuing relation between sacred and secular, and the need to witness to what true sacredness is. This is to be found in Christ's self-sacrificial love towards all who dismiss or are overwhelmed by the painful demands of this same love.

The power of negative thinking: Truth, melancholia, and the tragic sense of life.

The power of negative thinking: Truth, melancholia, and the tragic sense of life.

The Unpublished Poetry of Owen Dodson

The following is a selection of the unpublished poetry of Owen Dodson (19141983), culled from old handwritten or typewritten drafts found in various folders. Dodson, not unlike many poets, was accustomed to writing whenever the writing mood surfaced, and on whatever surface was at hand. He would write while at dinner, or in transit, on the backs of napkins, or on handbills, or brown paper bags; most of what survives, even some of the typewritten poems, are illegible or have portions missing. Some of these are early versions of later published poems; some are what Dodson might have considered failed efforts. Many of them are ideas which may have seemed wonderfully rich in their conception, but were ultimately distorted in their execution, and much of the distortion came from either or both of two sources: rheumatism and alcohol. What remains undistorted in these poems is Dodson's tragic sense of life as circumscribed by the recurrent specter of death. While Dodson was still a youth, the deaths of both his parents, only eighteen months apart, left their first and lasting impressions. Later in life, the death of his brother, and the passing of close friends and associates such as Paul Robeson, W.H. Auden, and Arna Bontemps, all within only a few months, reinforced an already pronounced awareness of mortality.' Nevertheless, there also appears in Dodson's poetry, in opposition to the threat of death, the eternal promise of faith. Sometimes this too suffers, but it always seems prepared to ward off death with its countervailing presence. At the horizon of this urge toward faith is a strong religious sensibility, nurtured by a strict Baptist upbringing. But the God of Dodson's universe must work long hours and often put in overtime, as death-wearing among its several guises cynicism, despair, failed intimacy, and racial discord-is capable of inciting chaos without notice. These two cosmic elements, faith and death, eternally at war with each other, characterize Dodson's poetic career-even and perhaps especially unto these attempts, which may also have fallen victim to a slow disintegration. Dodson probably responded to these poems as some of us would to so many unruly children-often with regret, but nevertheless with love. Even their flaws reflect something of the marrow of the poet's craft. In these works, talent, structure and nuance prevail as strength, sobriety and security appear, at points, to have ebbed. Though reconstructing these poems has not been a simple task, the responsibility for their remaining flaws is mine alone. Trained in the austere tradition of English poetry, Dodson ordinarily brooked no transgressions. Wherever spelling, punctuation or capitalization has been problematic, I have tried to retain Dodson's idiom as

Classical Aesthetics, Modem Ethics: Lacan, Kierkegaard, Sophocles, Anouilh

Ethics and Aesthetics I: Lacan, Kierkegaard, Sophocles, Anouilh foseph S. Jenkins Ethical conclusions are often affected by aesthetic factors. This is a phenomenon all the more important where these factors influence decisions unawares. Faced with a problem so broad in scope—as broad as human nature itself—it is futile to seek the one formula or conclusion. Rather, I propose to explore the intersec­ tion of ethics and aesthetics in a number of localities, hoping that in the continuing course of these potentially separate encounters some meaning may be made. I begin this first paper of the series with an interpretation of Jacques Lacan's Seminar VII. This Seminar provoked controversy in its radical break from the traditional Aristotelian/Kantian line of ethical analysis. Instead of seeking the highest good, Lacan prof­ fers ethics as a consideration of the relationship between an action and the desire that inhabits it (Lacan 359,361). He proposes that the tragic sense of life—the triumph of being toward death—is the proper dimension of ethical consideration (361). By relating ethics to the high aesthetic of tragedy, Lacan speaks to the intersection I seek to explore. The Seminar imparts no coherent description of the intersec­ tion; statements from various chapters must be assembled and interpreted. Part One of this paper takes on that project, based on my translation of Alain Miller's published transcripts. Part Two is a study of the Creon figure depicted in the Antigone plays of both Sophocles and Jean Anouilh. Lacan uses Sophocles's Antigone as his tutor text for research on both ethics and aesthetics, while Kierkegaard sees the two fields as strictly separate. By comparing those views in the context of Anouilh's post-war tragedy, I inves­ tigate aspects of the ethics/aesthetics intersection more specific to the late twentieth century. PART ONE Lacan's principal writings on aesthetics are contained in a Section of Seminar VII entitled The Essence of Tragedy. Remind­ ing us of Kant's position that the category of the beautiful can be

F. Scott Fitzgerald's Evolving American Dream: The "Pursuit of Happiness" in Gatsby, Tender Is the Night, and The Last Tycoon

Since first stirrings of F. Scott Fitzgerald revival in 1940s, readers have been fascinated by oppositions in his work and character. Critics from several different generations have noted how Fitzgerald used his conflicts to explore origins and fate of American dream and related idea of nation.(1) contradictions he experienced and put into fiction heighten implications of dream for individual lives: promise and possibilities, violations and corruptions of those ideals of nationhood and personality dreamed into being, as Ralph Ellison phrased it, of chaos and darkness of feudal past.(2) Fitzgerald embodied in his tissues and nervous system fluid polarities of American experience: success and failure, illusion and disillusion, dream and nightmare. did not care what it was all about, Hemingway's Jake Barnes confessed in Sun Also Rises. All I wanted to know was how to live in it.(3) Fitzgerald, who named and chronicled that brash, schizophrenic decade, was no stranger to dissipation of values and pursuit of sensation in Jazz Age of 1920s. But for all that, he strained to know what all about and how to live in it. To him, Hemingway's it was not simply existence and soul's dark night of melancholia and despair. It also stood for American reality that, combined with an extraordinary gift for hope and a romantic readiness,(4) led to extravagant promise identified with America and intense, devastating loss felt when dream fails in one or another of its guises. Face to face with his own breakdown, Fitzgerald traced his drastic change of mind and mood in his letters and Crack-Up pieces. From conviction during his amazing early success in his 20s that was something you dominated if you were any good,(5) Fitzgerald, at end of his life, came to embrace the sense that essentially a cheat and its conditions are those of defeat, and that redeeming things are not `happiness and pleasure' but deeper satisfactions that come out of struggle.(6) Abraham Lincoln was Fitzgerald's American exemplar of this wise and tragic sense of life (Turnbull, Letters [L] 96). And in Last Tycoon (LT) he associates Monroe Stahr's commitment to lead movie industry closer to ideal mix of art and entertainment with Lincoln's creative response to contradictions of American democracy embodied in Union. Fitzgerald's invocation of Lincoln recalls proud and humble claim he made to his daughter from Hollywood. don't drink, he wrote; then, as if freed from a demon's grasp, he recounted inner civil war he fought to keep his writer's gift intact: am not a great man, but sometimes I think impersonal and objective quality of my talent and sacrifices of it, in pieces, to preserve its have some of epic grandeur. Some sort he qualifies, as it! preparing for ironic, self-deflating admission in next sentence. Anyhow after hours I nurse myself with delusions of that sort (L 62, 61). But Fitzgerald did preserve essential value of his talent; pages he left confirm that. Like Lincoln who lived only long enough to sketch out what a truly reconstructed nation might look like, Fitzgerald was defeated in his attempt to finish his last novel. Yet what he wrote all more poignant because, finished, Last Tycoon might have recast and reformulated intractable oppositions of Great Gatsby and Tender Is Night. The test of a first rate intelligence, Fitzgerald wrote in Crack-Up (Wilson, CU), that posthumous collection full of his sinewy, mature, self-reliant thought, is ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at same time and still retain ability to function (CU 69). By function, Fitzgerald means more than cope; he's affirming that readiness to act in world with something approaching one's full powers--a willingness of heart combined with enabling critical intelligence. …

Tragic man and courageous man: A response to Rubens

Richard Rubens examines the extent to which the tragic sense of life is essentially related to the process and goals of psychoanalysis. In doing so, he offers a rich and sensitive exegesis of the meaning of “tragic”: Tragedy is not text but context; it is not factual but interpretive. Tragic man is no everyman. He is not a victim but a creator. Rubens envisages him as Job asking, “What is man?” and as Oedipus asking, “Who am I?” I see tragic man in a similar light but from a different perspective. Tragic man is the mankind of moral and social consequence. He is the artificer, Daedalus, daring to create in the face of limitation while worrying cautiously about his son’s audacity in not heeding limitation. Tragic man is his brother’s keeper-a Hillel thinking out loud about the I, the you, and the when. He is an exquisitely wise man distressed by the existential loneliness of knowing that few share his wisdom. He knows that rationality has limitations, and that comprehension is method and not goal. Tragic man is also courageous man bcause he intends to prevail in the face of adversity and chaos. He is tolerant of paradox insofar as he is committed to comprehending the incomprehensible. He will create order within himself, knowing that order need not exist outside himself. Once having created such order, he will transform it into a new order, initiating a new chaos of uncertainty that needs, once again, a new internal order to contain it and sustain it. This commitment is a willingness to face situations from which it would be natural to run away. It consists of transcending normal fears . . . and it is neither impetuous nor foolish, but discriminating and sober. Courage, like the sense of the tragic, comes from inner conviction, not from external circumstances; circumstances is the arena in which it is revealed. Its presence indicates a commitment to live by certain values that make meaningful and dignified an existence that would otherwise be meaningless. For Tillich (1952) courage has two meanings: an ethical and an ontological meaning. As a human act based upon values, courage is an ethical phenomenon, while as an

Psychoanalysis and the tragic sense of life

In this paper, psychoanalysis is compared to a phenomenological theory of tragedy in which tragedy is understood as a mode of viewing life that insists on a balance being maintained between human striving for rational understanding and the acceptance of certain irreducibly irrational elements of human experience. Many of the underlying assumptions of psychoanalysis are found to correspond closely to those of the tragic vision of life: the commitment to the search for truth and the understanding of individual experience, paired with a recognition of the inherent limitations of that search and the inevitable relativity of those truths; the belief in the possibility and importance of meaningful individual action without any avoidance of the powerfully determining influence of personal history, prehistory, and intrapsychic structure; the focus on the irreversibly forward flow of time, and the resultant reality of loss that is an absolute dimension of the very process of living. These issues are explored with particular attention to the roles of transference, repressed endopsychic structure, and termination within the psychoanalytic process.

The Novels of F. Scott Fitzgerald.

Acknowledgements - Scott Fitzgerald's Novels - From The Romantic Egoist to This Side of Paradise - The Beautiful and the Damned - The Great Gatsby - The Wise and Tragic Sense of Life - Notes - Selected Bibliography - Index

The minister as healer, the healer as minister

A major task of the minister is that of healer, and with the healing task come some special opportunities. These relate to the therapy of the word, awakening in all the tragic sense of life, an identity with the wounded healer, distinguishing between healing and curing, and accepting the medical education enterprise as a patient. The healer as minister broadens the healing community into a priesthood of all believers. Further, our rich heritage of healing is anchored in the biblical tradition, and a study of this will show a similarity between ancient and modern healing.

Farce Transformed: Plautus, Shakespeare, and Unamuno

Farce is a generator of materials that can be utilized and even transformed by other modes-by comedy, of course, but even by romantic and tragic styles. In the next-to-last of his dozen dramas-El Otro (The Other), 1932 -Miguel de Unamuno (1864-1936) accomplishes a remarkable metamorphosis of certain raw materials of farce. He brings them into the realms of fundamental human melodrama and of tragedy. Here, as in other plays, he explores the themes of his best known work, The Tragic Sense of Life (1913). A still more significant point for dramatic criticism: if one read The Other without knowing who wrote it, one might suppose it to be by Pirandello. A characteristic Pirandellian procedure is the translation of a basically farcical situation into an epistemological problem. These diverse points can be boldly juxtaposed because the working out of their relationships canvasses each issue better than would an independent treatment of it. To say that farce is neither the fetus nor the corpse of comedy is to say that farce is neither a temporary primitive stage which necessarily grows into full comedy, nor the residue when comedy goes into a decline. Nevertheless cultural history, rather than some organic rise and fall, may make farce seem like the earliest, or the dilapidated latest, stage of comic form. We can see a development in time from early Greek phallic rites-fertility farce, as it were-to the sophisticated comedy of Aristophanes; from the farce of the miracle plays and sixteenth-century

Education and the Tragic Sense of Life: The Thought of Miguel de Unamuno

Education and the Tragic Sense of Life: The Thought of Miguel de Unamuno

A contextualist thanatology: A pragmatic approach to death and dying

Abstract Viewed from the modern American standpoint, life is the ground of all our values and death is a limiting condition. The approach discussed in this paper is pragmatic and hence contextualistic. Denying the value of death but accepting its reality, the author points to dying, not death, as the problematic phenomenon with which a pragmatist thanatology must deal Focusing on the dying individual as the core context, other related contexts are recognized and examined: the medical, the religious, and the familial (including friends as well as relatives). It is suggested that dying contains opportunities for growth—for the dying as well as for their surviving friends and relatives. In dying, the tragic sense of life may be most poignantly felt, not in the sense that life is ultimately doomed (for that is pathetic and not tragic), but in the sense that, though ending for the individual, life is ultimately valuable.

Pragmatism and the Tragic Sense of Life.

Last summer in Honolulu, on a Sunday when the East-West Philosophers' Conference was not in session, I made an interesting discovery. I wandered into a church in which after the minister delivered his sermon the audience was invited to question him and make critical comments. I enjoyed it immensely. Had I remained in Hawaii I would have become a member of that congregation. although I recognize that there are occasions when one should listen and not talk back, I have often suffered when compelled to sit patiently as waves of rhetoric or streams of outrageous misstatement or misinterpretation washed over me. My sympathy therefore goes out to any audience which must endure with silent composure the discussion of a controversial theme. My sympathy is tempered by the realization that all of you have the means and the long memories to make effective replies. In casting about for a theme, I consulted some of my distinguished predecessors who told me: For Heaven's sake and our own, don't merely give us another paper. Say something of general significancewhich I took to be an encouragement to talk about large and controversial matters in an old-fashioned way.

M. de Unamuno, "The Tragic Sense of Life in Men and Nations", trans. A. Kerrigan (Book Review)

M. de Unamuno, "The Tragic Sense of Life in Men and Nations", trans. A. Kerrigan (Book Review)

Pragmatism and the Tragic Sense of Life.

Pragmatism and the Tragic Sense of Life.