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
The ever-popular and highly readable C.S. Lewis has "done it again." This time with a book beginning with the premise "God is Love" and analyzing the four loves man knows well, but often understands little, Affection, Friendship, Eros and Charity, exploring along the way the threads of Need-Love and Gift-Love that run through all. It is written with a deep perception of human beings and a background of excellent scholarship. Lewis proposes that all loves are a search for, perhaps a conflict with, and sometimes a denial of, love of God. "Man approaches God most nearly when he is in one sense least like God. For what can be more unlike than fullness and need, sovereignty and humility, righteousness and penitence, limitless power and a cry for help?" To relate the human activities called loves to the Love which is God, Lewis cites three graces as parts of Charity: Divine Gift-Love, a supernatural Need-love of Himself and a supernatural Need-love of one another, to which God gives a third, "He can awake in man, towards Himself a supernatural Appreciative love. This of all gifts is the most to be desired. Here, not in our natural loves, nor even in ethics, lies the true center of all human and angelic life. With this all things are possible." From a reading of this book laymen and clergy alike will reap great rewards: a deeper knowledge of an insight into human loves, and, indeed, humans, offered with beauty and humor and a soaring description of man's search for God through Love.
Pub Date: July 27, 1960
ISBN: 0156329301
Page Count: 144
Publisher: Harcourt, Brace
Review Posted Online: Oct. 17, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
This is our life, these are our lighted seasons, and then we die. . . . In the meantime, in between time, we can see. . . we can work at making sense of (what) we see. . . to discover where we so incontrovertibly are. It's common sense; when you-move in, you try to learn the neighborhood." Dillard's "neighborhood" is hilly Virginia country where she lived alone, but essentially it is all those "shreds of creation" with which every human is surrounded, which she is trying to learn, to know — from finite variations to infinite possibilities of being and meaning. A tall order and Dillard doesn't quite fill it. She is too impatient to get about the soul's adventures to stay long with an egg-laying grasshopper, or other bits of flora and fauna, and her snatches from physics and biological/metaphysical studies are this side of frivolous. However, Ms. Dillard has a great deal going for her — in spite of some repetition of words and concepts, her prose is bright, fresh and occasionally emulates (not imitates) the Walden Master in a contemporary context: "Trees. . . extend impressively in both directions, . . . shearing rock and fanning air, doing their real business just out of reach." She has set herself no less a task than understanding emotionally, spiritually and intellectually the force of the creative extravagance of the universe in all its beauty and horhor ("There is a terrible innocence in the benumbed world of the lower animals, reducing life to a universal chomp.") Experience can be focused, and awareness sharpened, by a kind of meditative high. Thus this becomes somewhat exhausting reading, if taken in toto, but even if Dillard's reach exceeds her grasp, her sights are leagues higher than that of Anne Morrow Lindbergh's Gift from the Sea, regretfully (re her sex), the inevitable comparison.
Pub Date: March 13, 1974
ISBN: 0061233323
Page Count: -
Publisher: Harper's Magazine Press
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1974
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
