The Paradox of Tragedy

The Paradox of Tragedy PDF Author: D.D. Raphael
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000543765
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 94

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Book Description
First published in 1960, The Paradox of Tragedy raises the fundamental question, why do we enjoy tragic drama with its themes of death and disaster? Aristotle’s theory of catharsis is still widely accepted as a satisfactory explanation of this paradox. In the first of its two connected essays, D.D. Raphael argues that Aristotle’s account of tragic emotions is distorted by a faulty psychology and fails to solve the problem. Raphael offers instead a new theory of Tragedy, as a conflict between two forms of the sublime, in which the sublimity of human heroism is exalted above the sublimity of overwhelming power. The spirit of the Tragedy is liable to conflict with doctrines of Biblical theology, and the difficulties of fusing the two are explored with illustrations from Greek, Biblical, English, and French literature. The second essay discusses the wider topic of philosophical drama, considering in what sense tragic and other forms of serious drama may be called philosophical, and also pointing out the dramatic shape of much of Plato’s philosophy. In this discussion, the question of religious Tragedy reappears in a different perspective. This book will be an essential read for scholars and researchers of philosophy in general and political philosophy in particular.

The Paradox of Tragedy

The Paradox of Tragedy PDF Author: D.D. Raphael
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000543765
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 94

Get Book Here

Book Description
First published in 1960, The Paradox of Tragedy raises the fundamental question, why do we enjoy tragic drama with its themes of death and disaster? Aristotle’s theory of catharsis is still widely accepted as a satisfactory explanation of this paradox. In the first of its two connected essays, D.D. Raphael argues that Aristotle’s account of tragic emotions is distorted by a faulty psychology and fails to solve the problem. Raphael offers instead a new theory of Tragedy, as a conflict between two forms of the sublime, in which the sublimity of human heroism is exalted above the sublimity of overwhelming power. The spirit of the Tragedy is liable to conflict with doctrines of Biblical theology, and the difficulties of fusing the two are explored with illustrations from Greek, Biblical, English, and French literature. The second essay discusses the wider topic of philosophical drama, considering in what sense tragic and other forms of serious drama may be called philosophical, and also pointing out the dramatic shape of much of Plato’s philosophy. In this discussion, the question of religious Tragedy reappears in a different perspective. This book will be an essential read for scholars and researchers of philosophy in general and political philosophy in particular.

The Tragic Paradox

The Tragic Paradox PDF Author: Leonard Moss
Publisher: Lexington Books
ISBN: 0739171224
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 260

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Book Description
Paradox informs the narrative sequence, images, and rhetorical tactics contrived by skilled dramatists and novelists. Their literary languages depict not only a war between rivals but also simultaneous affirmation and negation voiced by a tragic individual. They reveal the treason, flux, and duplicity brought into play by an unrelenting drive for respect. Their patterns of speech, action, and image project a convergence of polarities, the convergence of integrity and radical change, of constancy and infidelity. A fanatical drive to fulfill a traditional code of masculine conduct produces the ironic consequence of de-forming that code—the tragic paradox. Tragic literature exploits irony. In Athenian and Shakespearean tragedy, self-righteous male or female aristocrats instigate their own disgrace, shame, and guilt, an un-expected diminishment. They are victimized by a magnificent obsession, a fantasy of un-alloyed authority or virtue, a dream of perfect self-sufficiency or trust. The authors of tragedy revised the concept of “nobility” to reflect the strange fact that grandeur elicits its own annulment. “Strengths by strengths do fail,” Shakespeare wrote in Coriolanus. The playwrights made this paradoxical predicament concrete with a narrative format that equates self-assertion with self-detraction, images that revolve between incredible reversals and provisional reinstatements, and speech that sounds impressively weighty but masks deception, disloyalty, cynicism, and insecurity. Three heroic philosophers, Plato, Hegel, and Nietzsche, contributed invaluable but contrasting accounts of these literary languages (Aristotle's Poetics will be discussed in connection with Plato's attitude toward poetry). Their divergent descriptions can be reconciled to show that invalidations as well as affirmations—the transmission of contraries—are essential for tragic composition. An equivocal rhetoric, a mutable imagery, and an ironic progression convey the tortuous pursuit of personal preeminence or (in later tragic works by Kafka and Strindberg) family solidarity and communal safety. I am trying to integrate the disparate arguments offered by several notable theorists with technical procedures fashioned by the Athenian dramatists and recast by Shakespeare and other writers, procedures that articulate the tragic paradox.

Suffering Art Gladly

Suffering Art Gladly PDF Author: Jerrold Levinson
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1137313714
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 284

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Book Description
A collection of newly composed essays, some with a historical focus and some with a contemporary focus, which addresses the problem of explaining the appeal of artworks whose appreciation entails negative or difficult emotions on the appreciator's part - what has traditionally been known as "the paradox of tragedy".

Tragic Pathos

Tragic Pathos PDF Author: Dana LaCourse Munteanu
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1139502344
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 293

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Book Description
Scholars have often focused on understanding Aristotle's poetic theory, and particularly the concept of catharsis in the Poetics, as a response to Plato's critique of pity in the Republic. However, this book shows that, while Greek thinkers all acknowledge pity and some form of fear as responses to tragedy, each assumes for the two emotions a different purpose, mode of presentation and, to a degree, understanding. This book reassesses expressions of the emotions within different tragedies and explores emotional responses to and discussions of the tragedies by contemporary philosophers, providing insights into the ethical and social implications of the emotions.

Tragic Pleasure from Homer to Plato

Tragic Pleasure from Homer to Plato PDF Author: Rana Saadi Liebert
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1316885615
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 229

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Book Description
This book offers a resolution of the paradox posed by the pleasure of tragedy by returning to its earliest articulations in archaic Greek poetry and its subsequent emergence as a philosophical problem in Plato's Republic. Socrates' claim that tragic poetry satisfies our 'hunger for tears' hearkens back to archaic conceptions of both poetry and mourning that suggest a common source of pleasure in the human appetite for heightened forms of emotional distress. By unearthing a psychosomatic model of aesthetic engagement implicit in archaic poetry and philosophically elaborated by Plato, this volume not only sheds new light on the Republic's notorious indictment of poetry, but also identifies rationally and ethically disinterested sources of value in our pursuit of aesthetic states. In doing so the book resolves an intractable paradox in aesthetic theory and human psychology: the appeal of painful emotions.

The Tragic Paradox

The Tragic Paradox PDF Author: J. P. Guépin
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Dionysia
Languages : en
Pages : 384

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Book Description


Tragic Pleasures

Tragic Pleasures PDF Author: Elizabeth S. Belfiore
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 1400862574
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 429

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Book Description
Elizabeth Belfiore offers a striking new interpretation of Aristotle's Poetics by situating the work within the Aristotelian corpus and in the context of Greek culture in general. In Aristotle's Rhetoric, the Politics, and the ethical, psychological, logical, physical, and biological works, Belfiore finds extremely important but largely neglected sources for understanding the elliptical statements in the Poetics. The author argues that these Aristotelian texts, and those of other ancient writers, call into question the traditional view that katharsis in the Poetics is a homeopathic process--one in which pity and fear affect emotions like themselves. She maintains, instead, that Aristotle considered katharsis to be an allopathic process in which pity and fear purge the soul of shameless, antisocial, and aggressive emotions. While exploring katharsis, Tragic Pleasures analyzes the closely related question of how the Poetics treats the issue of plot structure. In fact, Belfiore's wide-ranging work eventually discusses every central concept in the Poetics, including imitation, pity and fear, necessity and probability, character, and kinship relations. Originally published in 1992. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

A Philosophy of Tragedy

A Philosophy of Tragedy PDF Author: Christopher Hamilton
Publisher: Reaktion Books
ISBN: 1780236220
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 176

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Book Description
A Philosophy of Tragedy explores the tragic condition of man in modernity. Nietzsche knew it, but so have countless characters in literature: that the modern age places us squarely before the reflection of our own tragic condition, our existence characterized by utmost contingency, homelessness, instability, unredeemed suffering, and broken morality. Christopher Hamilton examines the works of philosophers, writers, and playwrights to offer a stirring account of our tragic condition, one that explores the nature of philosophy and the ways it has understood itself and its role to mankind. Ranging from the debate over the death of the tragedy to a critique of modern virtue ethics, from a new interpretation of the evil of Auschwitz to a look at those who have seen our tragic state as inherently inconsolable, he shows that tragedy has been a crucial part of the modern human experience, one from which we shouldn’t avert our eyes.

Ontology and the Art of Tragedy

Ontology and the Art of Tragedy PDF Author: Martha Husain
Publisher: State University of New York Press
ISBN: 0791489795
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 163

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Book Description
Ontology and the Art of Tragedy is a sustained reflection on the principles and criteria from which to guide one's approach to Aristotle's Poetics. Its scope is twofold: historical and systematic. In its historical aspect it develops an approach to Aristotle's Poetics, which brings his distinctive philosophy of being to bear on the reception of this text. In its systematic aspect it relates Aristotle's theory of art to the perennial desiderata of any theory of art, and particularly to Kandinsky's.

The Tragedy of Heterosexuality

The Tragedy of Heterosexuality PDF Author: Jane Ward
Publisher: NYU Press
ISBN: 1479895067
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 205

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Book Description
Winner, 2021 PROSE Award in the Cultural Anthropology & Sociology Category Finalist, 2021 Lambda Literary Award in LGBTQ Studies A troubling account of heterosexual desire in the era of #MeToo Heterosexuality is in crisis. Reports of sexual harassment, misconduct, and rape saturate the news in the era of #MeToo. Straight men and women spend thousands of dollars every day on relationship coaches, seduction boot camps, and couple’s therapy in a search for happiness. In The Tragedy of Heterosexuality, Jane Ward smartly explores what, exactly, is wrong with heterosexuality in the twenty-first century, and what straight people can do to fix it for good. She shows how straight women, and to a lesser extent straight men, have tried to mend a fraught patriarchal system in which intimacy, sexual fulfillment, and mutual respect are expected to coexist alongside enduring forms of inequality, alienation, and violence in straight relationships. Ward also takes an intriguing look at the multi-billion-dollar self-help industry, which markets goods and services to help heterosexual couples without addressing the root of their problems. Ultimately, she encourages straight men and women to take a page out of queer culture, reminding them “about the human capacity to desire, fuck, and show respect at the same time.”