New Literary History focuses on theory and interpretation-the reasons for literary change, the definitions of periods, and the evolution of styles, conventions, and genres. Throughout its history, NLH has always resisted short-lived trends and subsuming ideologies. By delving into the theoretical bases of practical criticism, the journal reexamines the relation between past works and present critical and theoretical needs. A major international forum for scholarly interchange, NLH has brought into English many of today' s foremost theorists whose works had never before been translated. Under Ralph Cohen's continuous editorship, NLH has become what he envisioned over thirty years ago: "a journal that is a challenge to the profession of letters." NLH has the unique distinction of receiving six awards from the Council of Editors of Learned Journals (CELJ).
Volume 35, Number 1, Winter 2004: Rethinking Tragedy
CONTENTS:
Felski, Rita, 1956-
Introduction
Steiner, George, 1929-
"Tragedy," Reconsidered
Abstract: George Steiner reconsiders the arguments of The Death of Tragedy more than forty years after its publication. Noting the radical indeterminacy of "tragedy" and "tragic," he seeks to delimit these terms not through fruitless attempts at formal definition but by elucidating a common core of suppositions. According to Steiner, this core consists of a sense of ontological homelessness, of "alienation or ostracism from the safeguard of licensed being." In reflecting on his earlier arguments, he now concedes that this sense of fundamental estrangement and primordial suffering is not superseded by modernity but continues to mark the thought of thinkers such as Marx, Freud, and Lévi-Strauss. Acknowledging the historical variety and fluctuation of tragic forms, he writes: "with few exceptions, 'tragedy' after Goethe perpetuates itself in prose fiction, in opera, in film, in reportage." At the same time, Steiner continues to insist on a fun damental difference between such modern expressions of the tragic and what he calls the "absolute tragedy" of the Greeks, which is marked by a radical pessimism alien to both Christianity and atheism.
Critchley, Simon, 1960-
I Want to Die, I Hate My Life--Phaedra's Malaise
Abstract: My focus is on the character of Phaedra and the nature of her malaise. I begin by trying to elicit the dramatic pattern of Phaedra's confessions of her desire, a desire that produces a guilty subjectivity that I illustrate with reference to Augustine's Confessions. I go on to describe Phaedra's existence as defined by the fact that, unlike the conventional tragic hero, she is unable to die, that existence is, for her, without exit. I pursue this thought by turning to Emmanuel Levinas's brief reading of Phédre and linking it to what is arguably the enabling motif of his work, namely that existence is not the experience of freedom profiled in rapture, ecstasy, or affirmation, but rather it is that which we seek to evade in a movement of flight that simply reveals-paradoxically-how deeply riveted we are to the fact of existence. Counter-intuitively perhaps, I try to show how this Levinasian thought has its home in Martin Heidegger's Sein und Zeit, in particular in his treatment of the concept of Befindlichkeit (state-of-mind or attunement) and its relation to thrownness and facticity. This is the ontological meaning of Phaedra's guilt: one's fundamental self-relation is to an unmasterable thrownness, the burden of a facticity that weighs one down without one's ever being able to pick it up. I try to show how this experience of guilt injects a fearful languor into Phaedra's limbs, a languor that I trace to the experience of erotic stupefaction: Phaedra is hypnotized by the desire that she loathes and it is here that she languishes. After linking languor to the concept of original sin, I seek to take seriously the possibility of Christian tragedy, that is, an essentially antipolitical tragedy that would consist in the rejection of the worldly order and the radical separation of subjectivity and the world. I conclude with a remark as to how Racine's Phédre might lead us to question some of our critical and theoretical doxai about the nature of tragedy.
Sands, Kathleen M.
Tragedy, Theology, and Feminism in the Time After Time
Abstract: This article is a theological response to the cases for and against tragedy by George Steiner, Terry Eagleton, and Carol Gilligan. It first articulates the peculiar values of tragedy as a genre and shows why a tragic sensibility would re-emerge in this post-modern moment. In response to Steiner and Eagleton, it argues that Western Christian theology has suppressed the tragic. In response to Gilligan, the article takes feminists to task for continuing this suppression of the tragic, while commending their apt critiques of Western thought for its association of women with evil.
DuBois, Page.
Toppling the Hero: Polyphony in the Tragic City
Abstract: "Toppling the Hero" considers contemporary uses of the term "tragic," as well as the philosophical tradition concerning tragedy. Page duBois argues that the earliest theorist of tragedy, Aristotle, wrote belatedly, from a post-classical perspective on the democratic city and its political/religious rituals, and began a long tradition of misreading fifth-century tragedy, focusing on management of the individual through tragic catharsis in a new kind of state. DuBois considers subsequent readings of tragedy that place the tragic individual at its center, including those of Hegel, Freud, Lacan, and Judith Butler. Recent work by classicists on Greek tragedy reveals a genre that precedes and overwhelms familiar and comfortable postAristotelian models of genre, subjectivity, and psychology. DuBois argues that Greek tragedy ecstatically exceeds the tragic hero in its haunting by the slaves of ancient Greek society, in its access to mourning, and in its choral song that is of necessity collective, diverse, and heterogeneous.
Dienstag, Joshua Foa, 1965-
Tragedy, Pessimism, Nietzsche
Abstract: This essay reexamines the link between tragedy and pessimism and disputes some assumptions commonly made about it. Debates about tragedy often suppose that connecting it to pessimism must render it elitist, reactionary or anti-political. But this discussion largely takes place in ignorance of the philosophical tradition of pessimism and, especially, of Nietzsche's aims in characterizing tragedy as an outgrowth of pessimism. While acknowledging limits to the human condition, pessimism, as many inheritors of Nietzsche have seen, rather than confirming existing identities, political or otherwise, instead sanctions a process of self-renovation based on an acknowledgment of the fundamental instability and perishability of human life. Pessimism is as much an ethic of radical possibility as it is of radical insecurity. It makes little sense, therefore, to link pessimistic tragedy with conservative politics. The pessimistic spirit is a restless one, unlikely to be enamored of the status quo. Tragedy, though always anti-utopian, is indeed pessimistic without being either conformist or dead.
Bronfen, Elisabeth.
Femme Fatale--Negotiations of Tragic Desire
Abstract: The article uses Stanley Cavell's claim that tragedy be thought of in terms of avoiding recognition of the other as a way to discuss a genre - film noir - which is usually ignored by tragic theorists. A close reading of Billy Wilders classic film Double Indemnity serves to present a way to think tragedy not just as a narrowly defined dramatic genre, but as a mode or structure of feeling, with the femme fatale as a particularly resilient contemporary example of tragic sensibility. For in the world of film noir she elicits fantasies of omnipotence, supporthing the hero's desire to stave off knowledge of his own fallibility at all costs. At the same time she performs a tragic acceptance precisely by assuming responsibility for her fate, because she comes to discover freedom in her embrace of the inevitability of causation. This article thus claims the femme fatale is not merely a stereotype, symptom or catchphrase for dangerous femininity but rather the subject of her narrative, an authentic modern heroine.
Love, Heather K.
Spectacular Failure: The Figure of the Lesbian in Mulholland Drive
Abstract: This essay considers the lesbian as a modern tragic figure through a reading of David Lynch's 2001 film Mulholland Drive. While many have identified Lynch's representation of female same-sex desire in the film as a textbook example of male fantasy, the film offers a subtle treatment of intimate relations between cultural plots of lesbian fantasy and lesbian tragedy. In this sense, Mulholland Drive insists on the importance of clichés and stereotypes in structuring reality at the same time that if offers several images of the reworking of such clichés in dream and fantasy. The paper considers lesbian representation in the film in the context of a longer tradition of cultural stereotypes, arguing that the tragic of failed lesbian should not be dismissed a mere specter of ideology. Rather, engaging with twentieth-century theorists of tragedy, Love argues that this pathetic figure is better understood as actually tragic, marked as she is by the exclusionary regimes of the modern.
Maffesoli, Michel.
Felski, Rita, 1956-, tr.
Megill, Allan, tr.
Rose, Marilyn Gaddis, tr.
The Return of the Tragic in Postmodern Societies
Abstract: In this translation from his recent book, L'Instant éternel: Le retour du tragique dans les sociétés postmodernes, Michel Maffesol develops a diagnosis of the present that draws on the earlier arguments of The Shadow of Dionysus, The Time of the Tribes, and other works. According to Maffesoli, the project of modernity, defined as a future-oriented faith in individual development and political transformation, is reaching its end. Against those who lament this sign of the apathy of the young or mourn the loss of history in the society of the spectacle, he argues that we need to take seriously the current transvaluation of cultural values. An orientation to the future is giving way to an immersion in the present; individual existence is replaced by affiliation with the group (the postmodern tribe); there is a wide-spread fascination w ith religiosity, mysticism, myth, the supernatural (the "New Age") as well as with violence, excess, and the glamor of self-destruction, whether simulated or real. These cultural symptoms point to a wide-spread resurgence of the tragic in its Nietzschean sense; living for the moment, recognizing the precariousnesss and vulnerability of existence and the limits of human agency, and yet affirming life in the face of death with exuberance and passion. Maffesoli's provocative recasting of the idea of the tragic invites us to look not to high art but rather to much-maligned aspects of popular culture--rock concerts, senseless violence, the worship of celebrities-for the true reincarnation of the spirit of Dionysus.