Rethinking Tragedy (review)

Tragedy, perhaps more than any other literary genre, has drawn the attention of both philosophers and critics, often generating extreme judgments and fierce debate. From Plato's perplexing banishment of the poets, and in particular the tragedians, from his republic, to George Steiner's recent claim that tragedy in its absolute form not only is no longer possible, but indeed has rarely been produced since Greek antiquity, it is clear that tragedy—whether one considers its narrative content, aesthetic shape, political ideologies, or potential worldview—is a vexed term. Adding to the controversy of defining tragedy is its vernacular, typically adjectival usage, whereby real-life events ranging on an emotional thermometer from sad to devastating are deemed "tragic."

In her incisive and helpful introductory essay to Rethinking Tragedy, Rita Felski provides an overview of the ways tragedy has been variously approached and perceived by critics over the centuries, with particular attention to twentieth and twenty-first century questions and assertions. Rethinking, as Felski posits it, involves conceiving of tragedy as a "mode," which opens the door for the 16 articles collected in Rethinking Tragedy (just over half of which were published together in a 2004 issue of New Literary History) to participate in this discussion. The volume seems to take pride in its multi-disciplinarity: the writers are scholars from the fields of classics, political science, philosophy, literature, theater, anthropology, sociology, film and religion. While such a wide range of voices is promising, and certainly reveals the extent of current interest in tragedy, the degree to which the authors employ similar theories, definitions, or understandings of the history of the debate surrounding tragedy varies significantly, making the articles, in most instances, best approached individually rather than as an interdisciplinary discussion.

The collection starts off with an essay by George Steiner, who, far from rethinking the thesis of his 1961 book, The Death of Tragedy simply reasserts it here. Coupled with a similar reiteration by Terry Eagleton of his position (vehemently opposed to Steiner's) to close the volume, these bookend essays unfortunately do the project a disservice not only for the way they undermine the proclaimed task (giving the impression that rethinking can only repeat previous thought), but also because so placing this pair of well-known and rival theories gives the essays that come between them almost parenthetical status. While many readers will no doubt be drawn to the book by these two prominent names, the familiar arguments of both Steiner and Eagleton are regularly invoked and discussed throughout the volume, making the inclusion of their essays unnecessary. Furthermore, it is rather off-putting that both of these authors has chosen to take on, each in his distinctive way, a somewhat imperious tone.

The second essay, by contrast, reflects what I take to be the goal of the book. In "Generalizing about Tragedy," Simon Goldhill, well attuned to the intellectual history of tragedy and the tragic, carefully considers the way in which tragedy has come to have an additional meaning beyond that of a literary genre. Tracing the influence of Kantian aesthetics on subsequent thinkers of tragedy, Goldhill demonstrates the pitfalls and dangers of generalizations proceeding from German Romantic thought, especially when such abstract notions and ideals are anachronistically applied to Attic tragedy.

Certainly one of the most important contributions to the volume, Goldhill's essay is commendable for its clarity, elegance and erudition, but perhaps above all for its acknowledgment of the stakes involved in generalizing about the tragic, stakes that few of the other writers in this collection seem quite so willing to admit. Goldhill cautions against the tendency of "introducing a hierarchy into perceptions of human suffering—downplaying your mundane misery in the name of my truly tragic" (46). On his account, this valuation system masks a political stance: "a recognition of 'real pain,' 'genuine suffering,' becomes a political self-justification, where all too often the claim to tragedy—the tragedy of the rape victim, the tragedy of illness, the tragedy of the Palestinian people—is an attempt to arrogate an...