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

Parution revue

Information publiée le lundi 5 septembre 2005 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 wrotethat ‘Tragedy is that form of art which requires the intolerableburden of God's presence.' Nevertheless, he insists throughoutthat Christianity is inimical to tragedy because it determinesthat the ways of God and man are both just and rational. Thisessay explores Steiner's complex literary approach to tragedyand juxtaposes it with tragedy as historical event as investigatedby Terry Eagleton in his 2003 volume Sweet Violence: The Ideaof the Tragic. It argues that the tragic concerns all that ishuman in relation to God. But in Christ God takes into Himselfthat tragedy such that tragedy does not have the last word.Nevertheless the tragic remains in living sacrificially, livingecstatically towards the other and the only way we can dwellin such a place is to take upon ourselves the ‘intolerableburden' 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, arguethat tragedy remains salient even if it can no longer be understoodin terms of classical Aristotelian principles. Others arguethat tragedy retains its significance because it can now beunderstood in terms of the sublime. This paper starts with Kierkegaard'sattempt to revise the notion in a way that frees it from Aristoteliancanonical principles. Kierkegaard's reformulation hints at theidea of an unconscious. In considering Freud's notion of a ‘symptomaticact', the paper argues that tragedy glossed in ways thataccommodate 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'sOthello, but where does this sense that injustice is unbearablecome from? Where does the impossible expectation that injusticewill end, or the corollary belief—that the triumph ofevil must mean the world is out of joint and that eventuallyit will be righted—come from? Where there is a check uponnaked self-interest, relentless aggrandisement, sheer graspingof power, it comes—not from some contractual understandingthat our will cannot be done without compromise with the other,some balancing of our freedoms as in Hegel's critique—butfrom some desire to make the world a just place, that is, topartner the creation by securing it through acts of justice.In Othello, this craving for justice becomes particularly painfulin part because it is brought into relief precisely in the contextof the other justices, economic and retributive, strict andabsolute, that triumph disastrously. When tragedy replaces theMass as the form where the full force of sacrifice is felt,the distinction between sacrifice and murder becomes urgent—forjustice 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 forrethinking the idea of integrity. These occasions may promptus to set aside notions of pristine wholeness, moral perfection,and solitary authenticity for a more relational integrity, informedby the paradigms of performance and kenosis. This essay firstjuxtaposes King Lear with a film by Kristian Levring, The KingIs Alive, and then moves to Shakespeare's earlier A MidsummerNight's Dream. All three works are metatheatrical, and depictpeople playing-as-others in solicitude for others. Each in itsway broaches the ethical and theological possibility of ‘kenoticintegrity'.