Vision Of Tragedy Research Articles

Eugene O’Neill’s Philosophy of Difficult Theatre: Pity, Fear, and Forgiveness

Eugene O’Neill’s Philosophy of Difficult Theatre: Pity, Fear, and Forgiveness

Tragedy, Dignity, and the Dionysian

abstract Arthur Miller is a moralist, but his moral vision is not as simple as it sometimes is taken to be. Miller does not hold his characters against an objective moral standard; rather, his goal is to encourage his readers to examine the social mores that underlie their own moral judgments and self-narratives. In this way, Miller's project is much like Nietzsche's, as is his vision of tragedy, which is based on the experience of crises in a person's self-narrative or sense of dignity. Like Sean O'Casey and absurdist dramatists, Miller is working within a Nietzschean metaphysics of the tension between our oversimplified Apollonian narratives and the Dionysian complexity of life. Miller's critique of the ways the inadequacies of our cultural myths misguide our lives and our societies continues today in the works of commentators who seek to understand the tribalism and tensions in contemporary American society.

Investigating the origins of Peter Wessel Zapffe’s notion of tragedy in Aristotle’sPoetics: the case ofmimesis

AbstractThe aim of this paper is to present the philosophical figure of a Norwegian philosopher and writer, creator of biosophy, Peter Wessel Zapffe (1899–1990), and to investigate the origins of his notion of tragedy (tragic experience) which he introduces in his magnum opusOm det tragiske(1941). I attempt to do so by searching its roots in antique theory of tragedy introduced by Aristotle, especially on the pages ofPoetics, to which Zapffe himself often refers to. A study of how Zapffe “read” and understood Aristotle’sPoetics, a classical piece for the study of tragedy and tragic experience, seems essential for establishing the roots and foundations of his own vision of tragedy and its functions, finally shifting from the purely literary sphere to the biosophical level of human existence. In this paper I will focus mainly on the notion and art ofmimesis, laying the basis for further detailed studies of Zapffe’s biosophical analysis of the subject.

Eugene O'neill and the Reinvention of Theatre Aesthetics

Eugene O'neill and the Reinvention of Theatre Aesthetics

Death of a Salesman and Skeleton Crew

Death of a Salesman and Skeleton Crew

From Antigone to Antonia: Moving beyond the teleological model of tragedy for young audiences

ABSTRACTAlongside the rich tradition of international tragic adaptation for adult and general audiences, adaptations of tragedy for youth have proliferated around the world in the last several decades. As reaction to these works and to other representations of bad acts for and by young people demonstrate, these plays, which often feature murder, suicide, betrayal, martyrdom, and moral decay, present a substantial challenge to the conventions of appropriateness Manon van de Water cites as central to much contemporary TFY production. Yet adaptations of tragedy for youth must also grapple with a teleological ethics that treats tragedy largely as a means to a developmental end rather than an aesthetic experience in and of itself, presenting a substantial challenge for playwrights interested in producing vital and complex tragedy for young audiences. In this article, I survey trends in global tragedy for young audiences in order to outline an alternative vision of tragedy for young audiences which treats young audiences not as raw material to be molded into the practice of a particular model of goodness but as an end in themselves, outlining an ethics of artistry rather than an ethics of artistic effects.

Miller, O'Neill, Moral Despair, and Tragedy

There is a shift in Arthur Miller's moral vision and his vision of tragedy after his marriage to Marilyn Monroe ended in divorce in 1961. In his plays of the 1940s and early 1950s, Miller expresses a Kantian, objectivist, highly moralistic vision of the human condition. His characters in those plays are depicted as having fallen into tragedy because they in some way have violated this objective moral order of the universe. During his marriage to Monroe in the late 1950s, however, Miller tried hard to actualize his own moral vision of a supportive and loving husband, but he failed to make that ideal real. As a result, he comes out of this marriage less moralistic and more forgiving of the ways in which people fail to actualize their moral ideals but also more in despair about the possibility of living a moral life. His plays of the 1960s-in particular After the Fall- explore this despair in a way that brings Miller closer to the dark moral vision of Eugene O'Neill's later plays, such as The Iceman Cometh, Long Day's Journey into Night, and A Moon for the Misbegotten.There are also, however, significant differences between Miller and O'Neill. In his late plays, O'Neill depicts his characters as being crippled by their sense of universal moral failure endemic to the human condition; as a result, these characters become unable to engage with their lives in any fulfilling way. Miller's characters, on the other hand, as Brenda Murphy (315-16) has pointed out, confront this same endemic moral failure but see it as something like Hannah Arendt's concept of the pervasiveness of the banality of evil (Thinking 159) and find a way to re-engage in their lives with a new, more attentive humility.The change in Miller's moral vision after his marriage to Monroe affected the structure of the tragedies he wrote. In the plays before the marriage, tragedy results from some moral mistake a character has made, what Aristotle called hamartia. But in all three of Miller's plays in the 1960s, moral failure of some kind is not a personal mistake but rather a pervasive part of being human. In each of Miller's plays from the 60s, there is an accuser and an accused, and the vision of tragedy emerges from their dialogue exploring their relationship.Let us begin to look at this connection between changes in Miller's moral vision and his vision of tragedy by considering his plays of the 1940s and 50s. One key assumption in his moral vision in this early work is expressed in the central theme of his first Broadway play: The Man Who Had All the Luck (1944). This play concerns David Beeves, who is financially successful during the Depression but worries that his success may be fragile because it is based on luck rather his own actions. Ultimately, Beeves narrowly avoids financial disaster through his own diligence and determination, and as a result, he finally begins to be convinced that he deserves his own success. The theme of being able to earn and success is expressed most vividly in the play in Beeves lament in the middle of Act 2. Beeves wife, Hester, says, Isn't it good to be lucky. Beeves replies:Isn't it better to feel that what you have come to you because of something special you can do? Something, something ... inside you. ... Damn it all, if everything drops on you like fruit from a tree, for no reason, why can't it break away for no reason? Everything you have ... suddenly. ... A man has a right to get what he deserves. He does, damn it! (Collected 1944 50)The idea of people getting what they deserve is fundamental to Miller's vision of ethics and of tragedy in these early plays. The people who suffer here all are guilty of having made some particular, personal mistake or of having indulged in some self-serving delusional reasoning about who they are and how they are related to other people. This moral failure leads them to tragedyJoe Keller in All My Sons (1947), for example, tries to believe that his role as a businessman excuses him from moral obligations to the people who use his products. …

Arthur Miller: Self and Tragedy

Editor's Note: At the 2014 Modem Language Association Annual Convention in Chicago, the Miller Society organized a special round table session, Arthur Miller: Self and Tragedy, that discussed cognitive approaches to Miller's work. Presided by David Palmer, the session brought together the cognitive literary scholars, Patrick Colm Hogan and Bruce McConachie and the Miller scholars: Stephen A. Marino and Matthew C. Roudane. The following is an edited transcript of the session.Palmer: Welcome. This session is the beginning of events leading up to the Society's celebration of the centennial of Miller's birth in October 2015. The core idea for our round-table discussion this evening is quite simple: bring together two scholars who specialize in cognitive approaches to literature and two scholars who specialize in the works of Miller and let them discuss how cognitive approaches provide insights into Miller's vision of tragedy and how Miller's plays reveal the workings of the human mind, in particular how a person develops a sense of self.Miller's plays seem especially well-adapted to this discussion because of the way Miller structured his tragedies. As Ben Brantley, the theater critic of The New York Times, noted in a recent issue of The Miller Journal (Vol. VII, 1 & 2, Fall 2012, 2), Every one of Miller's plays is steeped in a sense of guilt that taints each of its characters; they all take place 'after the fall.' The crisis that prompts the collapse of the narrative that constitutes a person's self generally takes place in Miller's plays before the action begins. Miller approaches tragedy not as a depiction of the moment a character confronts his flawed self-narrative but as a depiction of his characters' floundering to find a new psychological equilibrium the confrontation has occurred, after the fall. This certainly is true of the Keller family in All My Sons (1947), of Willy Loman in Death of a (1949), of John Proctor in The Crucible (1953), and of Quentin in After the Fall (1964). The same pattern is seen in many others of Miller's plays and is what makes these plays such suitable subjects for a cognitive approach to literary interpretation, in particular our understanding of crises in a person's sense of self. This is the general theme our panelists will discuss.We'll begin the round table with brief opening statements from the two cognitive scholars and follow these with statements from the Miller scholars. There then will be a discussion among the panelists, and we hope to have 25 minutes at the end of the session for an open discussion with the audience.McConachie: I've entitled my opening remarks Salesman and Literary to indicate my general endorsement of this approach to literary criticism and my application of it to Miller's Death of a Salesman. I would modify literary Darwinism in a couple of ways, however, which I hope we can talk about during the discussion.In Graphing Jane Austin: The Evolutionary Basis of Literary Meaning (2012), authors Joseph Carroll and Jonathan Gottschall, plus their two co-authors, summarize the results of their web-based survey questioning hundreds of readers about their response to nineteenth-century British novels. The four literary Darwinists draw several conclusions, three of which are particularly relevant to our purposes today. First, following the work of others, they state that story-telling and listening helped small bands of our evolutionary predecessors to survive. Second, these stories endorsed egalitarian norms through an agonistic structure that favored such values over the norms that promoted individual success. Third, the literary Darwinists demonstrate that we are still telling these kinds of stories, which continue to communicate the biocultural norms we learned in our hunter-gatherer past.Let's look more closely at these conclusions before moving to Salesman. The authors make a strong case that our ancestors adopted altruistic norms around 100,000 years ago to ensure the social cohesion and survivability of their bands. …

La interpretación intelectualista de la tragedia: Una discusión critica

La naturaleza de la tragedia es materia de controversia. La visión intelectualista de la tragedia ha ganado terreno en los últimos años. En este trabajo me propongo discutir una versión heterodoxa y extrema del cognitivismo, defendida recientemente por Pierluigi Donini en La tragedia, senza la catarsi, la cual descarta de manera tajante la función catártica o emocional de los dramas trágicos y afirma que “la función de la tragedia no es la catarsis, sino su coronamiento o último paso: la comprensión”. La revisión de los argumentos esgrimidos por Donini permitirá aclarar algunos puntos oscuros de la teoría aristotélica de la tragedia, en particular, el lugar de la música y el espectáculo en el drama trágico.

The Tragic Paradox (review)

Reviewed by: The Tragic Paradox Jennifer Wallace (bio) Leonard Moss. The Tragic Paradox. Plymouth, UK: Lexington, 2012. Pp. xiii + 245. $70.00. Leonard Moss believes that tragedy deals in paradox. The source of a tragic hero’s greatness is also the cause of his destruction. The overriding desire for honor that motivates tragic protagonists also results in their shame and demise. And the close of tragedies includes a simultaneous sense of vindication and annulment, affirmation and negation. So far, so unsurprising. After all, the chorus in Antigone articulated very similar sentiments back in the fifth century BC: Man the master, ingenious past all measure past all dreams, the skills within his grasp— he forges on, now to destruction now again to greatness.1 And Hamlet followed suit: “What a piece of work is a man! How noble in reason, how infinite in faculty, in form and moving, how express and admirable, in action how like an angel, in apprehension how like a god—the beauty of the world, the paragon of animals! And yet, to me, what is this quintessence of dust?”2 Even George Steiner declared, in The Death of Tragedy in 1961, that “[t]ragedy would have us know that there is in the very fact of human existence a provocation or paradox.”3 So what’s new? Not much, is the answer. This is a book that reads as if it had been published in the 1960s, despite the reference to recent scholarship cited in the footnotes (but not discussed in the text). Its vision of tragedy is preoccupied with the tragic hero—and more specifically the tragic male hero—and the “challenge” that he poses to the supposed “masculine model.” Moss begins with ancient Greek tragedy, going through an exploration of both male and female stereotypes as evidenced in the work of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides. He continues with Shakespeare, who, he announces, “did not feature a female protagonist in his tragedies” (54). (What about Juliet or Cleopatra, one wonders? [End Page 545] And how does one define protagonist or tragedy in Shakespeare, anyway?) There is an excursion into the expected philosophers on tragedy—Hegel, Nietzsche, Plato, Aristotle—before two final chapters on Samson Agonistes and King Lear. As such, the chronology of the book follows similar boundaries to those adopted by Emily Wilson in her excellent Mocked with Death: Tragic Overliving from Sophocles to Milton (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004) (not cited anywhere by Moss). Moss only differs from Wilson’s focus in his brief inclusion of two modern examples of post-Nietzschean tragedy: Strindberg’s Dream Play and Kafka’s Metamorphoses. We learn inexplicably that Strindberg “may have been the first Nietzschean dramatist detailing the tragic plight of commonplace characters” (99) (Moss never mentions Ibsen for some unknown reason), but, in other respects, these later examples are forced into the same schematic, interpretative straitjacket as the rest of the book: Whether choric or heroic, tragic figures splinter supposedly rock-firm imperatives governing personal, family, and social life, juggling permanence with flux in their figurative language and narrative journeys as they try to renew a compromised identity. But the more avidly they struggle to reach that fixed goal, the more they contradict it. The metaphors of tragedy record their tumultuous struggle and their pitiable, fearful metamorphosis. (105) The difficulty with Leonard Moss’s analysis is that it is divorced from the historical context of the plays. The discussion of Greek tragedy, for example, focuses upon the “aristocratic” hero, without considering the function of tragedy in the new fledgling democracy of fifth-century Athens. As many critics, led by Jean-Pierre Vernant and Pierre Vidal-Naquet, have shown, the Greek tragedians were interested in exploring the tensions of living in a democratic city, by juxtaposing the individual with the collective, the hero with the chorus. The hybrid setting of tragedy, placed in the mythical world of kings while articulating the concerns of a democracy, served to highlight the anxieties of the transitional period of the fifth century. Exposed to tragic scrutiny, too, was the fifth-century attitude toward rhetoric, which was at once so vital to the functioning of the democracy and yet also perceived to...

Tragedy, Integrity, Guilt, and Shame: Understanding John Proctor

Perhaps Arthur Miller's most famous essay on theater is Tragedy and the Common Man, which appeared in New York Times on February 27, 1949, slightly more than two weeks after the opening of Death of a Salesman on Broadway. In it Miller defined tragedy in the following way:I think the tragic feeling is invoked in us when we are in the presence of a character who is ready to lay down his life, if need be, to secure one thing-his sense of personal dignity [tragic] flaw, or crack in the character, is really nothing-and need be nothing-but his inherent unwillingness to remain passive in the face of what he conceives to be a challenge to his ... image of his rightful status quality of [tragedy] that [shakes] us derives from the underlying fear of being displaced, the disaster inherent in being torn away from our chosen image of what and who we are in this world. (Theater Essays 4-5)Certainly this idea of a person being displaced and torn away from a chosen self-image is central to many of Miller's greatest tragedies. It is Joe Keller's retort to his son Chris, Who worked for in that war? When they work for nothin', I'll work for nothin' in act 3 of All My Sons (1947) (Miller, Collected 1944 156). It is Willy Loman's tirade at Biff toward the end of Death of a Salesman (1949): am not a dime a dozen. I am Willy and you are Biff Loman (Miller, Collected 1944 251). It is Eddie Carbone's demand in A View from the Bridge (1956) when he screams, Wipin' the neighborhood with my name like a dirty rag. I want my name, Marco (Miller, Collected 1944 635). It is Victor Franz's angry rejection of what he takes to be his older brother's condescending attempt to repair their relationship, You're not turning me into a walking fifty-year-old mistake, in Price (1968) (Miller, Collected 1964 263). It is a theme as old as Oedipus at Thebes. Gerald Weales has suggested that this is one of the most useful lenses for examining Miller's writings:... the most profitable way of looking at [Miller's] work is through his heroes and through the concern of each, however inarticulate, with his identity-his name, as both John Proctor and Eddie Carbone call it. (334)Christopher Bigsby elaborates on this idea in his discussion of Miller's conception of tragedy:... [Miller] implicitly draws from tragedy the notion that it deals with the need for the individual to his good opinion of himself, that the tragic hero is willing to lay down his life to sustain a vision of himself sometimes profoundly at odds with his former actions. (201)A month after Tragedy and the Common Man was published, a second Miller essay, The Nature of Tragedy, appeared in New York Herald Tribune. Here Miller added to his vision of tragedy by distinguishing between the tragic and the merely pathetic:Tragedy, called a more exalted kind of consciousness, is so called because it makes us aware of what the character might have been.... it is the glimpse of this brighter possibility that raises sadness out of the pathetic toward the tragic. (Theater Essays 10)In writing about Willy Loman, Weales also recognizes this element of failing to meet a personal ideal in Miller's conception of tragedy: ... What the play gives us is the final disintegration of a man who has never even approached his idea of what by rights he ought to have been (340).Willy Loman, like so many of Miller's heroes, had a vision of what he thought it was to be a successful human being, a person worthy of respect. But as events unfold, he discovers that rather than achieving this ideal, he is seeing it slip away into the unattainable. ideal can be only glimpsed, never realized. That perhaps is what Bigsby meant in the quotation above when he speaks of the character's need to retrieve his good opinion of himself. In many of Miller's plays, the character's confrontation with challenges to his sense of self happened in the past. …

Tropes of solitude and Lu Xun’s tragic characters

Much ink has been spilled over how Lu Xun’s (1881–1936) political views inform his creative writing and how politics and literature are mutually implicated, but the aesthetics of his tragic narratives remains marginal in literary studies. Often lauded as the father of modern Chinese literature, Lu Xun has not only made major contributions to the formation of literary realism but also put his unique vision of tragedy into practice. At the core of his tragic poems and narratives lie the tropes of solitude. The tragic is characterized, not by tragic incident, but by void thereof, by a state of speech-less solitude and nothingness (xuwu). The aesthetic implications of such a tragic vision are twofold. The creation and consumption of literature in China during the first half of the twentieth century focused on questions of the nation and society, but Lu Xun’s solitary characters in The Weeds ask fundamental existential questions while carving a space for a new genre of writing.

Is There An African Vision of Tragedy in Contemporary African Theatre ?

Is There An African Vision of Tragedy in Contemporary African Theatre ?

The Pattern of Thought in Light in August

THE PATTERN OF THOUGHT IN LIGHT IN AUGUST Robert Rawdon Wilson Light In August is not everyone's idea of a funny novel. Most readers would no doubt agree with Kazin, Sewall, and other critics, as well as with Faulkner himself, that it is essentially a "tragic" story.1 Certainly, it is suffused wifh pathos, sorrow, and most of the variables of tragedy. Nonetheless , there are, I believe, several comic elements in the novel which have been generally neglected. Taken in isolation, some of the novel's comic situations and characterizations might be passed over, but in their totality they are a significant element in its structure. I should like to argue that in particular there are ironic patterns which are central to the major concerns of Light In August. "Irony," of course, is not necessarily comic: the peripeteia of Greek tragedy, the "irony of events" which defines the novels of Hardy, and the dramatic reversals of Shakespeare's tragedies are all proofs that "irony" is a genuinely amphibian term existing healthily in both the comic and non-comic experience of literature. For the purposes of Ulis paper, however, I shall take "irony" to be mtimately related to, if not inseparable from, the comic experience. The peculiar lands of Faulknerian irony which I am going to discuss have more of Cervantes or Ariosto in them than Sophocles or Shakespeare. They are ironies not merely of reversal and frustration but of circularity as well. Faulkner's characters, in the moment of their thwarted, frustrated expectations, resemble less an Oedipus or a Lear confronting an awesome destiny—the dreadful image of some promised end—than they do a Quixote confronting the empty air of vanished giants or a Ruggiero clasping the empty space left by an invisible Angelica. That is, they are left not with the compensation of something exterior to themselves, both awesome and sacred, but with nothing but themselves and their own self-consciousness. Seen in another perspective, the ironies of Light In August recall the frustration of characters in works by Sartre, Camus, and Pynchon, among others. They are frustrations which are defined by their interiority, solitariness, and selffocusing . There are a number of ironic situations in Light In August, all of which involve the experience of an unforeseen event quite different from that which has been expected. For example, when Lucas Burch confronts Lena 1That Light In August is a "tragedy" has been compellingly argued by Alfred Kazin in his "The Stillness of Light In August" in William Faulkner: Three Decades of Criticism , eds. Frederick J. Hoffman and Olga W. Vickery (New York, 1963), pp. 247-265. It has been taken for granted by Richard B. Sewall in his The Vision of Tragedy ( New Haven, 1962). Edmond L. Volpe, in A Reader's Guide to William Faulkner (New York, 1964), also assumes that Light in August is a tragedy. Faulkner himself called the narration of Joe Christmas' life a "tragedy"; see Faulkner in The University, eds. Frederick L. Gwynn and Joseph L. Blotner (New York, 1965), p. 72. 155 156RMMLA BulletinDecember 1970 in the cabin, his sudden perception of her and the child, existing there in the exact point of space and time where his expectations had foreseen the reward, is ironic.2 Similarly, Hightower's conviction, after delivering Lena's child, that "this must be all" (p. 363), points up his ironic confrontation with Joe Christmas immediately afterwards. It might even be argued that the convergence of the novel's two basic series of events—Lena's search for Lucas which culminates in the birth of the child, and Joe's search for identity which ends in his death—is (to the perception of the reader, at least) inherently ironic. The most interesting of these patterns, however, occurs in the minds of the characters. This cognitive pattern wholly dominates the behavior of two characters —Christmas and Hightower—and is partially observable in others, particularly Byron Bunch. In fact, the nature of this pattern is suggested by the Negro's protest to Sheriff Watt: "I cant remember because I cant know" (p. 255). Here the seeming paradox that remembering should hinge upon knowledge could be dismissed, but perhaps...

Ancient Myths and the Moral Framework of Faulkner's "Absalom, Absalom!"

THE STUDY OF FAULKNER'S Absalom! against its cultural background, seen in the light of classical ideas of tragedy, is not new. Although three critical essays-by Ilse Dusoir Lind, Cleanth Brooks, and Richard Sewall-have discussed the tragic elements in the novel, none of examines in detail Faulkner's allusions to ancient mythology, and none therefore successfully illuminates the concrete elements of plot and character that constitute the author's ethical analogies.' most common explanation as to why Faulkner employed ancient myths has been that he attempted to create characters of heroic stature and to give the story historic dimensions. True. But previous studies have failed to emphasize the essential role that the fusion of the three major Western cultures-the Greek, the Hebrew, and the Christian-plays in Faulkner's tragic vision and the moral framework in which he sees Colonel Sutpen, perhaps his foremost tragic figure. In Absalom! Faulkner has succeeded in creating a man of the heroic magnitude necessary to originate a myth: the little boy, who at the age of fourteen did not lose his innocence but did discover his social position when he was turned away by a broadcloth monkey Negro from the door of the rich planter for whom his father worked; the little boy who made up his mind to take revenge on them-with them meaning the human puny mortals under the sun that might lie in hammocks all afternoon with their shoes off-and in order to do so needed money, a house, a plantation, slaves, a family-incidentally of course, a wife; who with this design in mind set out for Haiti, where, a few years later, he quelled a slave revolt and was rewarded with the 1 See Ilse Dusoir Lind, The Design and Meaning of Absalom!, PMLA, LXX, 887-912 (Dec., I955); Cleanth Brooks, Absalom, Absalom!: Definition of Innocence, Sewanee Review, LIX, 543-558 (Autumn, I959); Richard Sewall, Vision of Tragedy (New Haven, I959), pp. I33-I47.

Passionate Reverie: W. B. Yeats's Tragic Correlative

As a dramatic theoretician and a dramatist, Yeats has recently been given a good deal of attention. Bnt about the place and meaning of tragedy—and comedy7mdash;in the pattern of his aesthetic something remains to be said. While Yeats undoubtedly had a very good sense of humour, he recoiled from the comic spirit; thongh fearing it, he understood it very well. The threats in comedy were irony and parody, both of which he detected in Wilde and Beardsley, distorting and undercutting the integrity of their art. "I was in despair," he writes in the Autobiography, "at the new breath of comedy that had begun to wither the beauty that I loved, just when that beauty seemed to have united itself to mystery." And, though he responded enthusiastically to Cervantes and Rabelais, Synge and Villon, and cultivated an expert's interest in naughty ballads, it was gusto—another form of passion—which really attracted him, not the comic perceptions of life. The ecstatic moment was, after all, the highest achievement of literary art, and ecstasy was possible only in tragedy. But between the quiet dignity of Greek tragedy and the salty flavour of one of Synge's "reckless" comedies lay the whole spectrum of literary modes. Great combiner that he was, Yeats built into his vision of tragedy, and often into his poems, a tension (he once called it a "quarrel") between the desire to adapt comic gusto, vitality without strain, to the resonant ecstasy of tragedy, passionate and energetic with struggle. This, ultimately, became the dialectic balance between passion and reverie.