Genealogy of the Tragic

Genealogy of the Tragic PDF Author: Joshua Billings
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691176361
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 279

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Book Description
Why did Greek tragedy and "the tragic" come to be seen as essential to conceptions of modernity? And how has this belief affected modern understandings of Greek drama? In Genealogy of the Tragic, Joshua Billings answers these and related questions by tracing the emergence of the modern theory of the tragic, which was first developed around 1800 by thinkers associated with German Idealism. The book argues that the idea of the tragic arose in response to a new consciousness of history in the late eighteenth century, which spurred theorists to see Greek tragedy as both a unique, historically remote form and a timeless literary genre full of meaning for the present. The book offers a new interpretation of the theories of Schiller, Schelling, Hegel, Hölderlin, and others, as mediations between these historicizing and universalizing impulses, and shows the roots of their approaches in earlier discussions of Greek tragedy in Germany, France, and England. By examining eighteenth-century readings of tragedy and the interactions between idealist thinkers in detail, Genealogy of the Tragic offers the most comprehensive historical account of the tragic to date, as well as the fullest explanation of why and how the idea was used to make sense of modernity. The book argues that idealist theories remain fundamental to contemporary interpretations of Greek tragedy, and calls for a renewed engagement with philosophical questions in criticism of tragedy.

Genealogy of the Tragic

Genealogy of the Tragic PDF Author: Joshua Billings
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691176361
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 279

Get Book Here

Book Description
Why did Greek tragedy and "the tragic" come to be seen as essential to conceptions of modernity? And how has this belief affected modern understandings of Greek drama? In Genealogy of the Tragic, Joshua Billings answers these and related questions by tracing the emergence of the modern theory of the tragic, which was first developed around 1800 by thinkers associated with German Idealism. The book argues that the idea of the tragic arose in response to a new consciousness of history in the late eighteenth century, which spurred theorists to see Greek tragedy as both a unique, historically remote form and a timeless literary genre full of meaning for the present. The book offers a new interpretation of the theories of Schiller, Schelling, Hegel, Hölderlin, and others, as mediations between these historicizing and universalizing impulses, and shows the roots of their approaches in earlier discussions of Greek tragedy in Germany, France, and England. By examining eighteenth-century readings of tragedy and the interactions between idealist thinkers in detail, Genealogy of the Tragic offers the most comprehensive historical account of the tragic to date, as well as the fullest explanation of why and how the idea was used to make sense of modernity. The book argues that idealist theories remain fundamental to contemporary interpretations of Greek tragedy, and calls for a renewed engagement with philosophical questions in criticism of tragedy.

The Politics of Resentment

The Politics of Resentment PDF Author: Jeremy Engels
Publisher: Penn State Press
ISBN: 0271071982
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 181

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Book Description
In the days and weeks following the tragic 2011 shooting of nineteen Arizonans, including congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords, there were a number of public discussions about the role that rhetoric might have played in this horrific event. In question was the use of violent and hateful rhetoric that has come to dominate American political discourse on television, on the radio, and at the podium. A number of more recent school shootings have given this debate a renewed sense of urgency, as have the continued use of violent metaphors in public address and the dishonorable state of America’s partisan gridlock. This conversation, unfortunately, has been complicated by a collective cultural numbness to violence. But that does not mean that fruitful conversations should not continue. In The Politics of Resentment, Jeremy Engels picks up this thread, examining the costs of violent political rhetoric for our society and the future of democracy. The Politics of Resentment traces the rise of especially violent rhetoric in American public discourse by investigating key events in American history. Engels analyzes how resentful rhetoric has long been used by public figures in order to achieve political ends. He goes on to show how a more devastating form of resentment started in the 1960s, dividing Americans on issues of structural inequalities and foreign policy. He discusses, for example, the rhetorical and political contexts that have made the mobilization of groups such as Nixon’s “silent majority” and the present Tea Party possible. Now, in an age of recession and sequestration, many Americans believe that they have been given a raw deal and experience feelings of injustice in reaction to events beyond individual control. With The Politics of Resentment, Engels wants to make these feelings of victimhood politically productive by challenging the toxic rhetoric that takes us there, by defusing it, and by enabling citizens to have the kinds of conversations we need to have in order to fight for life, liberty, and equality.

The Philosophical Stage

The Philosophical Stage PDF Author: Joshua Billings
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691225079
Category : Greek drama
Languages : en
Pages : 288

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Book Description
A bold new reconception of ancient Greek drama as a mode of philosophical thinking The Philosophical Stage offers an innovative approach to ancient Greek literature and thought that places drama at the heart of intellectual history. Drawing on evidence from tragedy and comedy, Joshua Billings shines new light on the development of early Greek philosophy, arguing that drama is our best source for understanding the intellectual culture of classical Athens. In this incisive book, Billings recasts classical Greek intellectual history as a conversation across discourses and demonstrates the significance of dramatic reflections on widely shared theoretical questions. He argues that neither "literature" nor "philosophy" was a defined category in the fifth century BCE, and develops a method of reading dramatic form as a structured investigation of issues at the heart of the emerging discipline of philosophy. A breathtaking work of intellectual history by one of today's most original classical scholars, The Philosophical Stage presents a novel approach to ancient drama and sets a path for a renewed understanding of early Greek thought.

The Tragic Absolute

The Tragic Absolute PDF Author: David Farrell Krell
Publisher: Indiana University Press
ISBN: 9780253345363
Category : Idealism, German
Languages : en
Pages : 502

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Book Description
Exposes the core of tragic absolutes in German Romantic and Idealist philosophy.

Proud Shoes

Proud Shoes PDF Author: Pauli Murray
Publisher: Beacon Press
ISBN: 0807072273
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 376

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Book Description
First published in 1956, Proud Shoes is the remarkable true story of slavery, survival, and miscegenation in the South from the pre-Civil War era through the Reconstruction. Written by Pauli Murray the legendary civil rights activist and one of the founders of NOW, Proud Shoes chronicles the lives of Murray's maternal grandparents. From the birth of her grandmother, Cornelia Smith, daughter of a slave whose beauty incited the master's sons to near murder to the story of her grandfather Robert Fitzgerald, whose free black father married a white woman in 1840, Proud Shoes offers a revealing glimpse of our nation's history.

The Politics of Desire

The Politics of Desire PDF Author: Agustín Colombo
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1538144255
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 205

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Book Description
In his preface to Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus, Michel Foucault notes that in the late sixties, there is a turn away from Freud anda movement toward what he calls an “experience and technology of desire that is no longer Freudian”. Foucault, Deleuze, and Guattari were interested in, and engaged with this shift and their collective work in these areas spawned a larger post-Freudian literature. This book gathers contributions from international scholars with the aim of exploring the social, political, and philosophical dimension of Deleuze and Guattari’s, and Foucault’s critical encounters with psychoanalytic thought: Their possible connections, their divergences, the fields of reflection that these encounters open, and the problems and debates that led Foucault and Deleuze and Guattari to engage with psychoanalysis in the ways that they did. In doing so, the main goal of the book is not to engage in a critique of the discipline of Psychoanalysis as such, but to investigate how Foucault’s and Deleuze’s critique of Psychoanalysis gives rise to a political reflection that draws on some of Psychoanalysis key notions. Among these, the concept of Desire is central as it allows us to grasp the different ways in which Foucault and Deleuze politically engage with Psychoanalysis: for Deleuze, Desire is the element through which Revolution becomes possible, whereas for Foucault Desire is a cornerstone of the modern mechanisms of subjection. Drawing both on new material like Confessions of the Flesh, the 4th volume of Foucault’s History of Sexuality and on Foucault and Deleuze main work, the book covers a variety of topics including the contrast between Foucault’s and Deleuze political understanding of desire and pleasure; the genealogy of desire as a way to investigate the historical shaping of psychoanalysis; the relationship between psychoanalysis and the normalizing mechanisms of power (e.g. biopolitics and disciplinary regimes); the ways in which psychoanalysis and neoliberalism come together in particular moments, the status and role of desire in revolt, resistance, and transformation; Foucault and Deleuze’s different approaches to the unconscious; the role of desire in the formation of identity; etc.,. In the 50th anniversary of Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus, one of the major references that inspires the many chapters in this book, we aim to pay homage to these two important figures of contemporary thought by enriching and opening new lines of thought and problematization of the political reflection on Desire that Foucault and Deleuze developed.

Choruses, Ancient and Modern

Choruses, Ancient and Modern PDF Author: Joshua Billings
Publisher:
ISBN: 0199670579
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 440

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Book Description
The ancient singing and dancing chorus has exerted a powerful influence in the modern world. This is the first book to look systematically at the points of similarity and difference between ancient and modern choruses, across time and place, in their ancient contexts in modern theatre, opera, dance, musical theatre, and in political debate.

Literary Modernism, Queer Temporality

Literary Modernism, Queer Temporality PDF Author: Kate Haffey
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 3030173011
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 210

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Book Description
This book explores the intersection between the recent work on queer temporality and the experiments of literary modernism. Kate Haffey argues that queer theory’s recent work on time owes a debt to modernist authors who developed new ways of representing temporality in their texts. By reading a series of early twentieth-century literary texts from modernists like Woolf, Eliot, Faulkner, and Stein alongside contemporary authors, this book examines the way in which modernist writers challenged narrative conventions of time in ways that both illuminate and foreshadow current scholarship on queer temporality. In her analyses of contemporary novelists and critics Michael Cunningham, Jeanette Winterson, Angela Carter, and Eve Sedgwick, Haffey also shows that these modernist temporalities have been reconfigured by contemporary authors to develop new approaches to futurity.

Imperial Intimacies

Imperial Intimacies PDF Author: Hazel V. Carby
Publisher: Verso Books
ISBN: 1788735110
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 480

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Book Description
'Where are you from?' was the question hounding Hazel Carby as a girl in post-World War II London. One of the so-called brown babies of the Windrush generation, born to a Jamaican father and Welsh mother, Carby's place in her home, her neighbourhood, and her country of birth was always in doubt. Emerging from this setting, Carby untangles the threads connecting members of her family to each other in a web woven by the British Empire across the Atlantic. We meet Carby's working-class grandmother Beatrice, a seamstress challenged by poverty and disease. In England, she was thrilled by the cosmopolitan fantasies of empire, by cities built with slave-trade profits, and by street peddlers selling fashionable Jamaican delicacies. In Jamaica, we follow the lives of both the 'white Carbys' and the 'black Carbys', as Mary Ivey, a free woman of colour, whose children are fathered by Lilly Carby, a British soldier who arrived in Jamaica in 1789 to be absorbed into the plantation aristocracy. And we discover the hidden stories of Bridget and Nancy, two women owned by Lilly who survived the Middle Passage from Africa to the Caribbean. Moving between the Jamaican plantations, the hills of Devon, the port cities of Bristol, Cardiff, and Kingston, and the working-class estates of South London, Carby's family story is at once an intimate personal history and a sweeping summation of the violent entanglement of two islands. In charting British empire's interweaving of capital and bodies, public language and private feeling, Carby will find herself reckoning with what she can tell, what she can remember, and what she can bear to know.

Tragedy

Tragedy PDF Author: Terry Eagleton
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 0300252218
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 255

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Book Description
A new account of tragedy and its fundamental position in Western culture In this compelling account, eminent literary critic Terry Eagleton explores the nuances of tragedy in Western culture—from literature and politics to philosophy and theater. Eagleton covers a vast array of thinkers and practitioners, including Nietzsche, Walter Benjamin, and Slavoj Žižek, as well as key figures in theater, from Sophocles and Aeschylus to Shakespeare and Ibsen. Eagleton examines the political nature of tragedy, looking closely at its connection with periods of historical transition. The dramatic form originated not as a meditation on the human condition, but at moments of political engagement, when civilizations struggled with the conflicts that beset them. Tragedy, Eagleton demonstrates, is fundamental to human experience and culture.