...The tragedy of Abraham Lincoln's death gripped the North like no other event in the nation's young history. Southerners had lost their only hope for a just and magnanimous peace. However, like so much of the story of Lincoln's assassination, this view of his death is a myth — a myth that has been...

...Hölderlin developed the first version of Romantic organology, using his Death of Empedocles to confront Lessing’s theory of tragedy with Kant’s notion of “intellectual intuition.” Borrowing the term “organ” from Samuel Thomas Soemmerring, he developed this notion into the locus of real...

...Tragedy puts on trial limits and limitations, particularly those that demarcate the bounds of human life. For mortal humanity, this border demarcates life and death, the possibility and impossibility of embodied existence and experience. If tragedy is a question of pushing on and through ultimate...

... and Aeschylus’s Oresteia), Kurke reveals deep-seated divergences between the poetics of choral poetry (Pindar’s victory odes) and Attic tragedy. To achieve this major objective of a historical conceptualization of genre, she distinguishes between three kinds of historicist hermeneutics: one pertaining...

...In respect to the individual, the Greek culture that emerges from the readings in this book is strangely death-loving, and the tragedy of fifth-century Athens itself would consist in its failed attempt to value love when it is oriented toward a living individual. Whereas Chapter Five identified...

... on the relationship of the uncanny to “language” is present, as is the view that everyday life relieves the past. The transience of words and forms is also discussed. Lukács, on the other hand, viewed the tragedy of culture as a necessary, self-fulfillment in forms that exhibit an independent logic that leads further...

...Thoreau's writing evokes Nietzschean themes of tragedy and Dionysian religion, provokes comparison with a number of Kierkegaardian motifs, and prompts reflection on the possibility of human communication with animals. Thoreau works at redemptive writing, giving us this-worldly perceptions of heaven...

.... This view faces hardness, it endures and overcomes. The chapter then considers why the existence of tragedy in human existence appears to many moods, and to many people, destructive of faith in any religious truth and a barrier against rational assurance regarding the ultimate triumph of anything good...

...Shakespeare's Anthony and Cleopatra is known to be generically mixed and even anomalous in the extent and degree to which it combines tragedy, comedy, and romance with lyric, myth, history, and allegory. Shakespeare's play is also in good part about gender; it focally concerns one...

...In the wake of his early fascination with Arthur Schopenhauer’s dark pessimism, Friedrich Nietzsche discovered that Yes had an energizing and terrifying power in ancient Greek tragedy. In Albert Camus’s 1942 essay The Myth of Sisyphus, repetition drives home the pointlessness of existence...

...It is not by chance that philosophy was born on the sea, when the word “being” came into existence, floating between being and nothingness. This chapter explores the centrality of the Mediterranean as it relates to Europe, and argues that Greece is polytheism and tragedy. Europe becomes a world...

...In this chapter the author describes Stanley Cavell's reception of Renaissance skepticism as he begins to characterize the Renaissance mode of thought and proceeds to show the ways that Cavell has made use of Montaigne and Descartes to respond to Shakespearean tragedy. Eventually, through the use...

... Rousseau says about tragedy, and Greek tragedy in particular, another perspective emerges: catharsis and Aufhebung as a speculative sublation of historically embedded conflicts. Greek tragedy was not merely theater, but the staging of a originary agon between two kinds of “Greece,” one of which...

...This chapter examines the role of Nietzsche's Birth of Tragedy in Benjamin's Origin of German Trauerspiel. Benjamin articulates his theory of tragedy by contesting Nietzsche's account, but as his treatise develops, this overcoming of Nietzsche's work proves to be congruent...

... commons enclosure localized law state law tragedy of the commons Brackenridge understood that if democracy did not necessarily culminate in the vernacular participation and practices of ordinary people, it was crucially fueled by them. His political theory about democracy’s “middle way” and the civic...

...Shifting to the Reformation context, chapter three focuses on revenge drama—The Spanish Tragedy and Hamlet -- in part as a way of bringing into focus Shakespeare’s distinctive contribution to political aesthetics. The surprising conjunction between revenge and meta-dramatic...

...Tragedy, Christianity, and the impossible cross in Jesus' mortal body and, more specifically, in this body's expeausition. Jesus attests to this extreme exposure, with its implicit vulnerability, by attesting to his finitude in his interwoven articulations of “this is my body” and “'My God...

... limitations. While philosophers and students of American literature have responded to Cavell, his emphasis on tragedy and skepticism warrants attention from Shakespeare scholars as well. His books, which make frequent reference to the matters of genre and to the specific plays of the Shakespearean quantity...