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Religion and the Tragic (Literature and Theology, vol. 19, nº 2, June 2005)

Religion and the Tragic (Literature and Theology, vol. 19, nº 2, June 2005)

Publié le par Julien Desrochers

Literature and Theology provides a forum for interdisciplinary dialogue, inviting both close textual analysis and broader theoretical speculation as ways of exploring how religion is embedded within culture. Contributions, addressing questions of interest to both the disciplines of literature and theology, are encouraged to confront and challenge traditional modes of discourse within a wide range of related fields, encompassing biblical criticism, literary criticism, philosophy, politics, history, cultural studies, and contemporary critical theory or practice.

Volume 19, Number 2, June 2005

 

ARTICLES :

 

 

Jennifer L. Geddes :

Religion and the Tragic

 

Graham Ward:

Steiner and Eagleton: The Practice of Hope and the Idea of the Tragic

Abstract: In his 1961 study, The Death of Tragedy, George Steiner wrote that ‘Tragedy is that form of art which requires the intolerable burden of God's presence.' Nevertheless, he insists throughout that Christianity is inimical to tragedy because it determines that the ways of God and man are both just and rational. This essay explores Steiner's complex literary approach to tragedy and juxtaposes it with tragedy as historical event as investigated by Terry Eagleton in his 2003 volume Sweet Violence: The Idea of the Tragic. It argues that the tragic concerns all that is human in relation to God. But in Christ God takes into Himself that tragedy such that tragedy does not have the last word. Nevertheless the tragic remains in living sacrificially, living ecstatically towards the other and the only way we can dwell in such a place is to take upon ourselves the ‘intolerable burden' of such a hope.

 

Kenneth Surin:

Theology and Marxism: The Tragic and Tragi-Comic

Abstract: Despite attempts to claim that tragedy is ‘dead', powerful restatements of the concept continue to be made. Some, and here Raymond Williams and Terry Eagleton come to mind, argue that tragedy remains salient even if it can no longer be understood in terms of classical Aristotelian principles. Others argue that tragedy retains its significance because it can now be understood in terms of the sublime. This paper starts with Kierkegaard's attempt to revise the notion in a way that frees it from Aristotelian canonical principles. Kierkegaard's reformulation hints at the idea of an unconscious. In considering Freud's notion of a ‘symptomatic act', the paper argues that tragedy glossed in ways that accommodate such acts becomes difficult to demarcate from comedy, this in some way being Kierkegaard's fundamental insight.

 

Terry Eagleton:

A Response

 

 

Regina M. Schwartz:

Tragedy and the Mass

Abstract: There is something unbearable about Iago's triumph in Shakespeare's Othello, but where does this sense that injustice is unbearable come from? Where does the impossible expectation that injustice will end, or the corollary belief—that the triumph of evil must mean the world is out of joint and that eventually it will be righted—come from? Where there is a check upon naked self-interest, relentless aggrandisement, sheer grasping of power, it comes—not from some contractual understanding that our will cannot be done without compromise with the other, some balancing of our freedoms as in Hegel's critique—but from some desire to make the world a just place, that is, to partner the creation by securing it through acts of justice. In Othello, this craving for justice becomes particularly painful in part because it is brought into relief precisely in the context of the other justices, economic and retributive, strict and absolute, that triumph disastrously. When tragedy replaces the Mass as the form where the full force of sacrifice is felt, the distinction between sacrifice and murder becomes urgent—for justice is at stake.

 

Larry D. Bouchard:

Playing Nothing for Someone: Lear, Bottom, and Kenotic Integrity

Abstract: Tragedy depicts harm to integrity—personal, moral, bodily, even the integrity of nature—and so offers occasions for rethinking the idea of integrity. These occasions may prompt us to set aside notions of pristine wholeness, moral perfection, and solitary authenticity for a more relational integrity, informed by the paradigms of performance and kenosis. This essay first juxtaposes King Lear with a film by Kristian Levring, The King Is Alive, and then moves to Shakespeare's earlier A Midsummer Night's Dream. All three works are metatheatrical, and depict people playing-as-others in solicitude for others. Each in its way broaches the ethical and theological possibility of ‘kenotic integrity'.

 

 

BOOK REVIEWS:

 

Lindsay M. Sullivan:

Review: Precision and Depth in Flannery O'Connor's Short Stories Review: Flannery O'Connor and the Christ-Haunted South

 

Bradley A. Johnson:

Review: Conversations With Zizek

 

Elena Volkova:

Review: The Sacred Desert: Religion, Literature, Art, and Culture

 

 

Richard Holloway:

Review: The Sacred Desert: Religion, Literature, Art, and Culture

 

 

Heather Walton:

Review: The Sacred Desert: Religion, Literature, Art, and Culture

 

 

Geoffrey Rees:

Review: Foucault and Augustine Reconsidering Love and Power

 

 

Brian Murdoch:

Review: The Battle for Middle-Earth: Tolkien's Divine Design in The Lord of the Rings