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Reviewed by:
  • Rethinking Tragedy
  • David Krasner
Rethinking Tragedy. Edited by Rita Felski. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008; pp. viii + 368. $65.00 cloth, $24.95 paper.

In Edward Bond’s 1973 comedy The Sea, the iconoclastic hermit Evans observes: “They used to say tragedy purified, helped to let you go. Now it only embarrasses. They’ll make a law against it.” Along similar lines, the essays collected in Rethinking Tragedy examine tragedy’s evolution from purgation to dismissal. Yet the essayists also seek to revive its significance by broadening its scope. According to editor Rita Felski, Rethinking Tragedy draws from “scholars working in literature, classics, philosophy, anthropology, film studies, theology, and political theory” who yield “diverse perspectives in the value of tragedy, the contemporaneity of the tragic, and the task of rethinking what tragedy might mean today” (15). Disengaging the term from its theatrical origins (primarily Greek and German Romantic interpretations of tragedy), the authors investigate “tragedy” as applicable to multiple texts or cultural concepts.

The work begins with George Steiner, whose book The Death of Tragedy takes a dim view of tragedy in the modern world, and ends with Terry Eagleton, whose book Sweet Violence posits tragedy as an indicator of contemporaneous conditions. In “Rethinking Tragedy,” Steiner emphasizes tragedy as “a core of dynamic negativity” (32) where “nullity devours like a black hole” (40). Eagleton gainsays this, countering that “Steiner rehearses his familiar case (now broadcast in no less than seventeen languages) that the mildest whiff of hope is fatal to tragedy” (344). While Steiner deserves criticism for flaunting the number of translations of his book, Eagleton grinds his axe on Steiner, and both occasionally turn their profound intellectual debate into academic puffery or quibbling one-upmanship.

The other essayists work methodically through a multiple thicket of tragedy in literature, film, and social experiences. Although she flip-flops between catastrophe and tragedy, Wai Chee Dimock writes [End Page 514] insightfully about Homer and Euripides, considering their attitudes toward “total war” (Troy’s destruction, for example). Kathleen Sands takes up the religious implications of tragedy, emphasizing a feminist perspective on trauma, though she too fails to distinguish between tragedy and catastrophe. Joshua Poa Dienstag stresses tragedy and pessimism via Nietzsche, where a universe constantly in flux is a universe spiraling toward destruction.

Page DuBois debunks the great man theory of tragedy, noting that Greek tragedies also investigate issues of slavery. Martha Nussbaum continues her work on the concept of “pity” and eudaimonia (happiness) through an analysis of Sophocles’ Philocetes, and David Scott stresses temporality and its relationship to the tragic through the lens of C. L. R. James’s The Black Jacobins. Other superb essays include Stanley Corngold’s study of the German writer W. G. Sebald, Timothy Reiss’s comparison of Greek and African classics, Elizabeth Bronfen’s focus on the tragic femme fatale in film, and Heather Love’s close reading of the “tragic lesbian” in David Lynch’s 2001 film Mulholland Drive. There is also a translation of Michael Maffesoli’s complex and somewhat opaque essay on tragedy and postmodern society.

It is one of the chief virtues of this fluent and intelligent collection that it is not solely concerned with tragedy on the stage. But it is also its chief shortcoming. With the notable exceptions of fine essays by Simon Goldhill on Greek tragedy and Aristotle, Simon Critchley on neoclassicism, Racine’s Phaedra, and the play’s reinterpretation by the Wooster Group’s Phèdre—to You, the Birdie!, and Olga Taxidou’s analysis of Brecht’s 1948 Antigone as anti-tragedy, this collection has little to say about tragedy as an apparatus of theatre. And even those who undertake discussing theatre are often naïve about its content and function. There are many absorbing observations about literature and culture in this collection and several elegantly written essays, but the book avoids a sophisticated analysis of theatricality.

For many contributors, characters in plays are described as if they are living beings experiencing the narrative in real time rather than what they actually are: fictional representations embodied by actors. Such readings, while thoughtful, distort the meaning of theatre. Discussions of mimesis, staging, and performance are largely...

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