Tragic Sense Research Articles

Life and Debt (review)

Life and Debt Avrum J. Shriar This captivating documentary uses Jamaica as a case study to portray the impacts on Third World countries of Structural Adjustment Policies (SAPs) and the broader processes of trade liberalization and economic globalization they have helped intensify. SAPs refer to the collection of economic reforms that debtor countries have been forced to implement as a condition for receiving loans from international financial institutions such as the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund (IMF), and the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB). Typical structural "adjustments" include currency devaluations, reductions in government spending, higher interest rates, privatization of state industries, and reductions in trade barriers, such as import tariffs and quotas. These reforms and their effects are explored in the film from a wide variety of perspectives, including those of local farmers, factory workers, Rastafarian wise men, an economics professor, former politicians, and businessmen, as well as IMF officials. The main focusis on the problems created by [End Page 131] these reforms for Jamaica's agricultural and manufacturing sectors, but as well, the viewer is compelled to reflect on the impacts of drastically reducing government spending on essentials like education, health care, and poverty reduction, which in turn limit the country's very ability to develop in a broad, balanced manner and thereby pay off its loans. Ironically, as the film reveals, Jamaica's foreign debt increased from about US$0.8 billion in the late 1970s to US$7 billion by the time the film was produced (2001); by 2002/3 that debt still amounted to 150% of GDP, "one of the highest ratios in the world," according to the World Bank (2004, p. xi). The reduced trade barriers have spurred a huge increase in imports of meat, produce, and milk powder to the island, from countries such as the USA and Canada, where food production costs are generally lower and in many cases subsidized. The tragic result, as depicted so effectively in the film, has been a virtual disappearance of many agricultural and food processing activities, including onion, carrot, and peanut production, as well as local dairy and poultry operations. This has led to widespread losses of income and jobs, not to mention lower food security, a shaken sense of national pride, and a vanishing way of life in many regions of the country. Not surprisingly, perhaps, one of the only industries that do appear to be growing is private security services! Even Jamaica's famous banana culture has been threatened, following complaints before the World Trade Organization (WTO) by the US government (and its backers at Dole and Chiquita) about Jamaica's preferential access to the European market under the Lomé Agreement. Without that access and the fair price it yields them for their produce, the banana farmers interviewed in the film recognize that they will be destroyed, given their inability to compete with the excessively low labor costs that prevail in much of Central and South America. The film is at its most compelling in the juxtapositions and contrasts it draws. Former Prime Minister Michael Manley's eloquent and detailed descriptions of the historic and current dimensions of Jamaica's problems provide a sharp yet disturbing contrast to the simplistic if not vacuous discourse of former IMF Deputy Director Stanley Fischer and former Managing Director Horst Kohler. Similarly, the viewer is left feeling uneasy when the film repeatedly depicts the frivolous experiences of mass tourists, mainly from North America, who seem utterly oblivious to Jamaica's increasingly desperate and violent reality, and to the role of their own political and economic leaders in shaping that reality. The viewer comes to share the tragic sense of disappointment and lost hope that so many Jamaicans undoubtedly feel, some 40 years after their once optimistic and proud nation first gained independence of sorts from Britain in 1962. As Michael Manley points out, the country has done what it can to make do and struggle along, "but the country that comes out is nothing like the country that could have been." Life and Debt is an excellent, thought provoking film. It raises critical questions about the morality of global power structures and economic relationships, and their implications for...

Tragedy, Theology, and Feminism in the Time After Time

This article is a theological response to the cases for and against tragedy by George Steiner, Terry Eagleton, and Carol Gilligan. It first articulates the peculiar values of tragedy as a genre and shows why a tragic sensibility would re-emerge in this post-modern moment. In response to Steiner and Eagleton, it argues that Western Christian theology has suppressed the tragic. In response to Gilligan, the article takes feminists to task for continuing this suppression of the tragic, while commending their apt critiques of Western thought for its association of women with evil.

Femme Fatale--Negotiations of Tragic Desire

The article uses Stanley Cavell's claim that tragedy be thought of in terms of avoiding recognition of the other as a way to discuss a genre - film noir - which is usually ignored by tragic theorists. A close reading of Billy Wilders classic film Double Indemnity serves to present a way to think tragedy not just as a narrowly defined dramatic genre, but as a mode or structure of feeling, with the femme fatale as a particularly resilient contemporary example of tragic sensibility. For in the world of film noir she elicits fantasies of omnipotence, supporthing the hero's desire to stave off knowledge of his own fallibility at all costs. At the same time she performs a tragic acceptance precisely by assuming responsibility for her fate, because she comes to discover freedom in her embrace of the inevitability of causation. This article thus claims the femme fatale is not merely a stereotype, symptom or catchphrase for dangerous femininity but rather the subject of her narrative, an authentic modern heroine.

Catholicism and American Freedom: A History (review)

Reviewed by: Catholicism and American Freedom: A History Leslie Woodcock Tentler Catholicism and American Freedom: A History. By John T. McGreevy. (New York: W.W. Norton & Company. 2003. Pp. 431. $26.95.) Is anti-Catholicism really the last acceptable prejudice of the intellectuals? John T. McGreevy's masterful Catholicism and American Freedom offers abundant evidence to this effect. But McGreevy also situates this faintly self-pitying saw in broad historical context, with generous references to parallel developments in Europe and the British Isles. This has the effect of mostly deflating Catholic claims to victim status. Liberal intellectuals in the United States and Europe may have been prone to the grossest stereotypes in their various battles against the Church. They were right, however, to see the Catholic world-view as resting on assumptions in fundamental opposition to their own. Catholics, moreover, often promoted their views in ways that were calculated to confirm the worst prejudices of the other side. Catholics were not so much victims of liberal bigotry as liberalism's sparring partners—vigorous co-participants in an on-going debate about the nature of the human person and of society. "This book sketches the interplay between Catholic and American ideas of freedom," as McGreevy explains. "The trick is to capture two traditions in motion, not one: to explore American ideas about Catholicism along with the predispositions (at times blinders) framing the mental landscape of American Catholics" (p. 15). McGreevy's ambitious narrative opens with a pair of closely-related debates in the 1840's and '50's over slavery and education. Catholics in the United States, like those in Europe, were mostly opposed to emancipation, at least of the immediate variety. And in view of the overly Protestant content of the public school curriculum, many American Catholics—again, like those in Europe—championed public funding for religiously separate schools. What linked the two positions was a distinctively Catholic view of freedom. As Catholic intellectuals saw it, human freedom had moral meaning only in a relational context—a very different notion from the autonomous choice-maker posited by liberals. As McGreevy explains, "...Catholics saw moral choice and personal development as inseparable from virtues nurtured in families and churches" (p.36). Hence the almost obsessive Catholic fear of "liberal individualism and [End Page 357] social disorder" (p. 52) that characterized the Catholic revival in Europe and Catholic intellectual life in the United States. Nor did Catholic intellectuals see the mitigation of suffering as critical to human freedom, although nearly all liberals did. Suffering, in the Catholic view, was a means of spiritual purgation. It also underwrote communal bonds, as families and Church-sponsored institutions cared for those in distress. Catholic schools made eminent sense in such a world; slavery made a kind of tragic sense as well. Not surprisingly, abolitionists both in the United States and Europe trafficked in anti-Catholicism and continued to do so even after the death of slavery. The 1864 publication of the Syllabus of Errors caused liberals on both sides of the Atlantic to regard Catholicism more than ever as a threat to the secular nation-state. American liberals—most of them with abolitionist pedigrees—praised Bismarck's Kulturkampf, the Italian Risorgimento, and the various anticlerical laws in France. The Republican-controlled Congress in 1876 came close to ratifying a constitutional amendment prohibiting public aid to religious schools, and toyed with levying taxes on church-owned properties—a policy that would have had disproportionate impact on Catholics. The proponents of such measures were convinced that Catholic separatism undermined national unity. Many Catholic intellectuals confirmed their fears by trumpeting the ultramontanism so spectacularly embodied in the 1870 declaration on papal infallibility. Despite the polarization of the 1870's and '80's, a rapprochement of sorts took place in the early twentieth century. Catholic intellectuals and their liberal counterparts still saw the world through very different lenses. But Protestant and secular liberals had by this time abandoned their benign view of laissez-faire capitalism. So Catholics and liberals were increasingly able to make at least semi-common cause in support of social welfare measures and the regulatory state. The process reached its high-water mark during the first administration...

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.

Pragmatism and the Tragic Sense: Deweyan Growth in an Age of Nihilism

In the context of contemporary nihilistic tendencies in democracy and education, Dewey’s pragmatism must respond to the criticism that it lacks a tragic sense. By highlighting the Emersonian perfectionist dimension latent in the concept of growth, this paper attempts to reveal a sense of the tragic in Dewey’s work—his humble recognition of the double nature of democracy as both attained and unattained. It is precisely the lack of this sense of the tragic that characterises contemporary nihilism. In resistance to this, Deweyan growth points to a perfectionist education committed to the re–awakening of intensity of impulse.

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 SOUTHERN AGRARIANS, PROGRESS, AND THE TRAGIC VOICE

In this argument the Agrarian role in the American political drama is not necessarily the specific one implied by the dichotomy: “Agrarian versus Industrial” (Twelve Southerners [1930] 1977, xxxviii), or the policist pronouncement“… that the culture of the soil is the best… and that therefore it should have the economic preference and enlist the maximum number of workers”(xlvii). Instead, this is an attempt to place them in a role similar to that played by Sophocles' Antigone—and Sophocles himself—juxtaposing them to the North's Creon. I argue that the Southern Agrarian “voice,” when heard properly, makes, possible the tragic sense, adjured by America's unequivocal attachment to modernity's gospel of progress. By positioning the Agrarians in such a way the goal is to point out a way of thinking about the political world, to create a sensibility that is only possible when their voice or another like it is heard properly and with its own timbre. If the project is successful, then two aims will be realized. First, the place and role of the Southern Agrarians in the history of American political thought will be made clearer. And secondly, the history of American political thought will have been employed in part as a kind of theoretical advocacy in the service of American political theory.

Willa Cather and the Politics of Criticism

CONTENTS: Author's Note 1. Prologue 2. The Darkling Plain 3. Youth 4. Cather and Her Critics: 1910s-1940s 5. Cather and Her Critics: 1950s-1960s 6. Cather and the Feminists: The Problem 7. Cather and the Feminists: The Solution 8. Politics and Criticism 9. The Tragic Sense of Life 10. Red Cloud 11. Conclusion Notes Bibliography Index

The joy of philosophy: thinking thin versus the passionate life

Introduction: Philosophy through Thick and Thin (Being and Nothing Less) The Passionate Life The Politics of Emotion Justice, Sympathy, and Vengeance The Tragic Sense of Life Thinking Death in the Face: Death Fetishism, Morbid Solipsism Recovering Personal Identity

R�lvaag's Beret Revisited: A Rejoinder

4 Rolvaag's Beret Revisited: A Rejoinder by Harold P. Simonson The 1995 Ole E. Rolvaag International Seminar, held in Sandnessjoen , Norway - a short ferryboat ride from his birthplace on the island of Donna - demonstrated that interest in the novelists life and work continues unabated. Conference participants from both sides of the Atlantic reiterated Rolvaag s position today as a major writer whose relevance grows ever greater. Another indication of his importance is the lively, ongoing debate among scholars and critics who publish new insights about this Norwegian- American writer, sometimes to augment earlier ones and other times to propose radically different interpretations that trumpet an opposing viewpoint as out-and-out wrong. Of course professional courtesy requires assuasive caution as when Kristoffer E Paulson (in Norwegian-American Studies , 34), calls my own critical argument in Prairies Within: The Tragic Trilogy of Ole Rßlvaag (1987) "attractive and compelling . . . admirable, profound and penetrating" but "wrong."1 The controversy centers on the characters Per Hansa and his wife Beret in Rolvaag s deservedly most popular novel Giants in the Earth. In answering Paulson my intention is not to review the plethora of critical assessments published since the English version of the novel appeared in 1927. A useful summary of this nearly 70-year largess can be found in 0yvindT. Gulliksens Sandnessjoen paper, "Rolvaag-kritikken fra 1930-âra til idag" ("Rolvaag141 142 Harold P. Simonson critiques from 1930 to date).2 Suffice it to say that the common approaches to this novel and its major characters have focused on the themes of immigration and the concomitant social and psychological tensions arising when the old cultural ways clash with the new. Within this context my contribution to the debate highlights the religious issue. Thus I necessarily concentrate upon Beret who, in my judgment, projects the authors deepest insights as the protagonist who lives to the end of the trilogy, including Peder Victorious (1929) and Their Fathers' God (1931), whereas her husband meets his cold death in the final pages of volume one. Nevertheless , it is in Giants where the monumental issues arise, reaching tragic dimensions that reverberate throughout the subsequent novels. I argue that Beret is the person who bears the tragic sense of things. She feels deep in her bones that her husband's dream to do the impossible, to build his kingdom in America, is doomed to failure - moreover, that all such dreams carry retributive consequences . Pride costs a person's soul. Rolvaag showed no reluctance in suggesting it can cost a nation's as well. He knew the tradition well: the Faustian wager, the myth of hubris extending back to Greek tragedy, and the Biblical sin of exchanging God's will for one's own. Paulson finds a classical pattern shaping Giants , its "rising action " represented by Per Hansa 's land-taking and culminating in the birth of son PederVictorious on Christmas Day, and the "falling action" completed in the father's death.3 Within this rising/falling action Paulson also sees "circular" patterns of death/rebirth, the chief "death" being Beret's breakdown and her "rebirth" her restored mental and spiritual health, attributed to "the divine love of God and the human love of her husband" (P, 203). His allimportant point is this: the pattern of circularity stops when Beret's "authentic religious experience evolves into religious pride, a religious pride that finally precipitates Per Hansa's death" (P, 203). Her spiritual pride breaks the governing cycle and mitigates Per Hansa's responsibility for his own undoing, a conclusion undermining Paulson's claim that classical tragedy informs the novel. More important to this discussion is the onus he places upon Beret, whose religious experience, which brought peace and joy to Rolvaags Beret Revisited 143 her angst-darkened soul, supposedly changed into cranky pietism. He says she becomes a "fanatical believer in the forms of religion"; the testimony for such behavior he takes from the neighboring homesteader Syvert Tonseten, a man of shallow perception, who "cannot stand the new Beret" (P, 210). In concluding his analysis Paulson does two notable things. First , he cites Beret s "narrow dependence on religious forms and rituals" (P, 210) as the reason she sends...

The Cultural Construction of Chance in the Iliad *

Jean-Pierre Vernant (1990a, 1990b, 1990c) argues in a series of essays that the tragic sense of responsibility that develops in fifth-century Athenian drama arises at a point at which individuals are developing sufficient autonomy to begin making choices for which they are responsible, but are still tied to an inscrutable divine order that binds, even traps, individuals by their decisions. In the case of epic, Vernant continues, there is no action since “man is never envisaged as an agent” (1990c.44), that is, as “a responsible and autonomous subject who manifests himself in and through actions that are imputable to him” (1990b.50). Vernant, in making this argument, draws on a formula that is Kantian in its modern expression but has served to define the terms of the debate about the nature of agency in the Homeric epic. Stated in its most general form, agency rests upon a particular conception of the will, one that is free from such external controls as contingency or luck. Given a more ethical cast, agency requires the existence of morally autonomous individuals guided by their own rationally determined and freely chosen values. Only with such autonomy of the will can there be the responsible subject to which Vernant refers. Though variously conceived in Homeric scholarship, this tradeoff between agency and contingency has received its most prominent expression

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. …

School Reform and the Tragic Sense of Possibility

School Reform and the Tragic Sense of Possibility

The immoral sense

In preface of this book James Q. Wilson writes: I mean intuitive or directly felt belief about how one to act when one is free to act voluntarily (that is, not under duress). By 'ought' I mean obligation binding on all similarly situated.[1] I think this is good initial definition. It brings out two complementary yet seemingly opposed aspects of morally relevant action. On one hand, such action is free or voluntary in that agent controls his behavior by his unforced choice. On other hand, action is constrained in that agent is (or regards himself as) bound by universally applicable kind of obligation. These two aspects are not genuinely opposed insofar as agent acts autonomously in that he accepts these obligations for himself. The problems with Professor Wilson's book stem both from indeterminacy of criteria of as he defines it and from his thesis that people have naturally sense, that is formed out of intersection of their innate dispositions with their earliest familial experiences [2]. To begin with, there is question of legitimacy of referring to To extent can senses be inferred from persons' beliefs or actions? To extent can such inference avoid problematic proliferation of senses? Is there also tragic sense, comic sense, industrious sense, lazy sense, nationalist sense, cosmopolitan sense, and so forth? Does do anything more than reduplicate beliefs and behaviors on which it is based, as dormitive power was adduced to explain workings of opium? A much greater difficulty arises from apparent unity that Wilson ascribes to the Is there only one (kind of) sense? The difficulty here is that there may be many different, and opposed, criteria for ought that Wilson puts into his definition of moral sense. Liberal democrats may have one kind of criterion, Nazis another, Stalinists still third, and so forth. This plurality is not removed by universality he attributes to 'ought' when he defines it as an obligation binding on all persons similarly situated. For, as he points out in criticizing Kant's universalism, there may be different criteria of relevant similarity, that is, of what constitutes relevant universe within which rule is to operate [193]. Hence, Wilson's definition of a sense does not circumscribe unique kind of It may be helpful here to take account of some general considerations about morality. First, we must note distinction between positive and normative conceptions of In general, morality is set of rules or directives for actions and institutions, with accompanying attitudes or feelings, especially as these are held to support or uphold are taken to be most important values or interests of persons or recipients other than or in addition to agent. The rules purport to be categorically obligatory in that compliance with them is held to be mandatory for persons regardless of their personal inclinations or their institutional affiliations that are not directly connected with rules themselves. Within this general characterization, positive conception of morality consists in rules or directives that are in fact upheld as categorically obligatory; and this, in turn, on part of individuals or groups may be matter of words alone, or of beliefs, or of actions, depending on whether rules or directives are those that persons say to be upheld, or believe to be upheld, or do in fact uphold in their own actions as being right or obligatory. Contrasted with all such positive conceptions of morality is normative conception. This consists in precepts or rules or principles that are valid and thus to be upheld as categorically obligatory. The validity of morality in its normative conception is independent of persons or groups may contingently say or believe or do. …

Tragedy: Contradiction and Repression.

Drawing on philosophical and psychoanalytic methods of interpretation, Richard Kuhns explores modern transformations of an ancient poetic genre, tragedy. Recognition of the philosophical problems addressed in tragedy, and of their presence up through eighteenth- and nineteenth-century philosophical texts, novels, and poetry, establishes a continuity between classical and modern enactments. Psychoanalytic theory in both its original formulations and post-Freud developments provides a means to enlarge upon and inform philosophical analyses that have dominated modern discussions. From Aeschylus' classic drama Persians to the hidden tragic themes in Merchant of Venice, from the aesthetic writings of Kant to Kleist's narrative Michael Kohlhaas, Kuhns traces the writing and rewriting of the themes of ancient tragedy through modern texts. A culture's concept of fate, Kuhns argues, evolves along with its concepts and forms of tragedy. Examining the deep philosophical concerns of tragedy, he shows how the genre has changed from loss and mourning to contradiction and repression. He sees the fact that tragedy went underground during the optimism of the Enlightenment as a repression that continues into the American consciousness. Turning to Melville's The Confidence Man as an example of Old World despair giving way to New World nihilism, Kuhns indicates how psychoanalytic understanding of tragedy provides a method of interpretation that illuminates the continuous tradition from the ancient to the modern world. study concludes with reflections on the poetry of Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson. Each poet's celebration of the body, and the contribution of the senses to reason, perception, and poetic intuition, is seen as an embodiment of the modern tragic sensibility.

Ghost Woman: A Novel by Lawrence Thornton

186 Western American Literature an old man, still embittered against the fanatics who permitted mob rule to kill forty-four of the citizens of Milcourt, the fictionalized setting. His sentimental and emotionally laden account details much of what happened in historical Gainesville, although Clark bends history and factual detail to fit the fictional circumstances, sometimes leaving his story at sea with regard to probability. The centerpiece of the story, for example, is Todd’s quick, sexy, and improbable love affair with the head Rebel’s niece. The elder Todd describes every detail of his emotional trauma, sometimes giving a second-by-second account of what he felt, why he felt it, what he might have felt otherwise, etc. Clark’s attempt to approximate period vernacular renders many figures as caricatures in both their villainy and tender nostalgic remembrance. Todd’s inexorable analysis of every detail is often tedious, as is his self-recrimination, agitation, and passion. He witnesses horrendous catastro­ phe with calm acceptance compared to his anguish over social faux pas and verbal missteps. Further, Todd’s incessant and vicious attacks on the Confederacy, although possibly accurate in reflection of the anti-secessionist’s position, is unrelieved by any nobility of purpose on the part of the Rebels, nor any tragic sense of misguided and overzealous prosecution of law in a confused and terrible time. In Todd’s opinion, Confederates are only slightly better than bushwhackers, who are Unionists. Clark also plays fast and loose with historical detail, endowing Todd with a Spencer repeater, for example. Unaccountably, he increases the number of executed men from forty-two to forty-four, and his Milcourt has many more civilized appointments than existed in frontier-post Gainesville, which didn’t erect a courthouse until the 1870s. Although from time to time Todd rises to eloquence in his account, such poetic passages as appear here and there are routed by such observations as “At long last, it turned late in the day,” reinforced by more numerous descriptions of weeping than have been seen in any book not labelled “Romance.” In all, then, this fictional account of tragedy is more melodrama than tragedy. It’s far less interesting than the factual account published in 1963 by the Southwest Historical Quarterly. One wishes that Clark had forsaken the recol­ lected emotional trauma of a beardless youth and given a more exacting fictional twist to this horrible affair. CLAY REYNOLDS Denton, Texas &host Woman: A Novel. By Lawrence Thornton. (New York: Ticknor and Fields, 1992. 302 pages, $19.95.) Ghost Woman begins with an actual historical incident: an Indian woman Reviews 187 who has been living alone for years on San Nicholas Island is discovered and brought to Santa Barbara. From this point on, the novel travels to Never-Never Land. Thornton has an American town, a mission with Indians, and ranchos all functioning simultaneously in a historical time warp that is utterly absurd. The historical backdrop of this novel is so distorted and such a mishmash of misin­ formation that one wonders why it was not subjected to more rigorous editorial review. Stereotypes abound in the novel. O ’Reilly is the local Irish drunk. The American doctor is corrupt, ready to perform abortions at the drop of a hat. The Hispanic soldiers are all “unhappy conscripts,” whose “wives and lovers were back in desert villages,”which is a patent falsehood; the Spanish/Mexican soldiers in Santa Barbara almost to a man came with their spouses. Anything seems to go in this novel, the point of which seems to be to tell us that Spanish and American civilizations were immoral and disgusting macho cultures, while the Indians had a wonderful religion and lived wonderful lives. I can’t imagine a world more simplistic than portrayed in this morality play. Author Thornton, in an interview in Coastlines (Summer 1992), mentions the background research he did while working on Ghost Woman: “While the historical documents were useful in providing details about the Chumash and the Franciscans, my major source was photographs and drawings. I find that images open up my imagination, whereas documents tend to close it down.” One wishes he would have spent a little more time with...

A Bright Tragic Thing: A Tale of Civil War Texas by L. D. Clark

Reviews 185 Etilogy for a Brown Angel. By Lucha Corpi. (Houston: Arte Publico Press, 1992. 189 pages, $17.95.) Opening during the final violent hours of the 1970 National Chicano Moratorium as the protagonist, Gloria Demasco, discovers a child’s defiled body, Eulogy chronicles Demasco’s eighteen-year search for the murderer. As Demasco’s search moves from the political hotbed of East Los Angeles to its conclusion in the pastoral California wine country, Corpi’s novel loses all of its initial claim to political significance. The reader will be disappointed to find that this is a novel of missed opportunities. Corpi seems to lose sight of her original project after the opening chapters as the novel’s focus shifts from the geographical and political “scene” of the m urder to the powerful, but troubled, family of the victim. Corpi’s initial chapters strongly suggest a correspondence between the m urder and the riot­ ing in the midst of which the body appears. To this end, she alludes to Oscar Acosta, writer, attorney, and highly visible Chicano-rights activist, and journalist Ruben Salazar, who was killed by the L. A. police during the 1970 rioting. Corpi juxtaposes the child’s death with that of Salazar, the news of which recalled Acosta from voluntary exile in Acapulco and motivated him to write his influen­ tial 1973 work, The Revolt ofthe Cockroach People. But Corpi reneges, dropping the novel set up in the opening chapters and focusing instead upon the fragmenting Cisneros family. The evil, we find, is not social, but familial. However, with its mixed European and Mexican ancestry, its history of self-victimization and infighting, this family seems from certain very oblique angles to suggest the inflammatory social and racial dynamic dropped earlier. This does not pan out: like the novel’s political thrust, the Cisneros family’s metaphysical significance is never realized. Though Eulogy is a good read, one cannot but feel that itjust isn’t finished. Besides the novel’s political angle, which she seems to have tried and aban­ doned, Corpi has overdeveloped certain minor characters while merely sketch­ ing in others (Gloria’s husband and daughter for example) whose demands weigh heavily upon the mind of the protagonist. One feels upon finishing that Eulogy is but a draft or two away from something very good. BftlK LUKENS Princeton University A'Bright Tragic Thing: A Tale of Civil War Texas. By L. D. Clark. (El Paso: Cinco Puntos Press. 302 pages, $14.95.) L. D. Clark’s novel about “The Great Hanging” in Gainesville, Texas in 1862, is related through the recollections of Todd Blair, son of one of the condemned men who died as a result of Confederate actions to break up a “Peace Party Conspiracy” in several north central Texas counties. Todd is now 186 Western American Literature an old man, still embittered against the fanatics who permitted mob rule to kill forty-four of the citizens of Milcourt, the fictionalized setting. His sentimental and emotionally laden account details much of what happened in historical Gainesville, although Clark bends history and factual detail to fit the fictional circumstances, sometimes leaving his story at sea with regard to probability. The centerpiece of the story, for example, is Todd’s quick, sexy, and improbable love affair with the head Rebel’s niece. The elder Todd describes every detail of his emotional trauma, sometimes giving a second-by-second account of what he felt, why he felt it, what he might have felt otherwise, etc. Clark’s attempt to approximate period vernacular renders many figures as caricatures in both their villainy and tender nostalgic remembrance. Todd’s inexorable analysis of every detail is often tedious, as is his self-recrimination, agitation, and passion. He witnesses horrendous catastro­ phe with calm acceptance compared to his anguish over social faux pas and verbal missteps. Further, Todd’s incessant and vicious attacks on the Confederacy, although possibly accurate in reflection of the anti-secessionist’s position, is unrelieved by any nobility of purpose on the part of the Rebels, nor any tragic sense of misguided and overzealous prosecution of law in a confused and terrible time. In Todd’s opinion, Confederates...