A pithy examination of dramatic theory that shows glimpses of its whole landscape without getting bogged down in minutiae.
A book seeks to clarify Aristotle’s theory of tragedy, drawing from some of the archetypal tragic heroes of Western civilization.
After a sprint through Aristotle’s theory of tragedy in the Poetics and its famously ambiguous terms (mimesis, catharsis, hamartia), Golden (Achilles and Yossarian, 2009, etc.) leaps into applying it to canonical tragedies: Oedipus Rex, Othello, and Death of a Salesman. The author walks through summaries of each play, constantly analyzing their ethics and effects by comparing them to Aristotle’s original model. Death of a Salesman provides a unique challenge for Aristotle’s theory—Willy Loman, Arthur Miller’s “common man,” deviates from the noble heroes of Oedipus Rex and Othello. By the definition of tragedy as “the high brought low,” the jovial Loman doesn’t qualify. Golden dodges this difficulty by pointing out that Loman’s heroic flaw is bound up in his ignorance of his own missteps. Just like Othello and Oedipus, he is perfectly capable of preventing his own fall, but through fate and his own stubbornness, he can’t see why his family is in such a terrible state until it’s too late. A large portion of Golden’s examination revolves around the possible interpretations of Aristotle’s term for the emotional phenomenon that successful tragedy engenders in its audience: catharsis. He deftly describes his belief that catharsis is the creation of intellectual understanding, not an emotional purging or cleansing. The tragic hero’s mistakes serve as a warning for attentive audience members to beware of their own possible errors. And by those lights, tragedy is not a sentimental affair, but an existential reckoning. Golden pulls from three plays and a number of rich theories of tragedy in under a hundred pages, often presenting other authors’ rich analyses in large, blocky quote chunks. While brevity is certainly a virtue, condensing that sheer amount of material into such a short space makes it difficult for Golden to craft his own theories (and the quoted assessments that use other plays as their tragic models) into a cohesive shape. Still his work is an effective introduction to a broad swathe of tragic theory and the plays that stand at its base.
A pithy examination of dramatic theory that shows glimpses of its whole landscape without getting bogged down in minutiae.Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-63576-260-0
Page Count: 94
Publisher: Radius Book Group
Review Posted Online: July 13, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
This a book of earlier, philosophical essays concerned with the essential "absurdity" of life and the concept that- to overcome the strong tendency to suicide in every thoughtful man-one must accept life on its own terms with its values of revolt, liberty and passion. A dreary thesis- derived from and distorting the beliefs of the founders of existentialism, Jaspers, Heldegger and Kierkegaard, etc., the point of view seems peculiarly outmoded. It is based on the experience of war and the resistance, liberally laced with Andre Gide's excessive intellectualism. The younger existentialists such as Sartre and Camus, with their gift for the terse novel or intense drama, seem to have omitted from their philosophy all the deep religiosity which permeates the work of the great existentialist thinkers. This contributes to a basic lack of vitality in themselves, in these essays, and ten years after the war Camus seems unaware that the life force has healed old wounds... Largely for avant garde aesthetes and his special coterie.
Pub Date: Sept. 26, 1955
ISBN: 0679733736
Page Count: 228
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Sept. 19, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1955
If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.
The authors have created a sort of anti-Book of Virtues in this encyclopedic compendium of the ways and means of power.
Everyone wants power and everyone is in a constant duplicitous game to gain more power at the expense of others, according to Greene, a screenwriter and former editor at Esquire (Elffers, a book packager, designed the volume, with its attractive marginalia). We live today as courtiers once did in royal courts: we must appear civil while attempting to crush all those around us. This power game can be played well or poorly, and in these 48 laws culled from the history and wisdom of the world’s greatest power players are the rules that must be followed to win. These laws boil down to being as ruthless, selfish, manipulative, and deceitful as possible. Each law, however, gets its own chapter: “Conceal Your Intentions,” “Always Say Less Than Necessary,” “Pose as a Friend, Work as a Spy,” and so on. Each chapter is conveniently broken down into sections on what happened to those who transgressed or observed the particular law, the key elements in this law, and ways to defensively reverse this law when it’s used against you. Quotations in the margins amplify the lesson being taught. While compelling in the way an auto accident might be, the book is simply nonsense. Rules often contradict each other. We are told, for instance, to “be conspicuous at all cost,” then told to “behave like others.” More seriously, Greene never really defines “power,” and he merely asserts, rather than offers evidence for, the Hobbesian world of all against all in which he insists we live. The world may be like this at times, but often it isn’t. To ask why this is so would be a far more useful project.
If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-670-88146-5
Page Count: 430
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1998
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