Tragedy: Some Definitions and Approaches:

Tragedy: “A term with many meanings and applications. In drama, it refers to a

particular kind of play, the definition of which was established by Aristotle’s Poetics.”
Tragedy of this type involves the struggle and fall of an individual fighting against
overwhelming circumstances (Holman’s Handbook to Literature, 521-22).

Tragedy is not accidental, random, meaningless, or sheer misery. Tragedy, as defined by

poets, artists, dramatists, and composers, is not freak happenstance or simple bad fortune.
It is not mere carnage or grotesque news. It surely is not losing the seventh game of the
World Series, suffering a career-ending injury, or being voted out of office.

Aristotle: Tragedy requires nobility and excellence (“imitations of noble actions”) and the
fall of the tragic hero. The hero falls, in part, from an inner flaw, stain, weakness, or
miscalculation. This theory proves, in retrospect, to be remarkably resilient and
sophisticated (consider the de casibus tradition; pity/fear/katharsis; hamartia: fatal flaw,
sin, pollution, miscalculation).

Nietzsche: “Life is good because it is painful.” Tragedy began when the Apollonian
impulses (poetry and order) clashed with the Dionysian impulses (passion, excess, and
pleasure). Reason, rationalism, and the Enlightenment destroyed tragedy.

Hegel: Tragedy comes from the dynamic collision of equally justified causes which, at
the end of the play, are resolved or “sublated” in Hegel’s “eternal justice.” Tragedy is
seen as the clash between two obvious, but mutually exclusive, goods, or the dialectic
between two desired ends (which often can and do destroy each other).

Krutch: “We no longer tell tales of the fall of noble men because we do not believe that
noble men exist” (94). “We read but we do not write tragedies. The tragic solution of the
problem of existence, the reconciliation to life by means of the tragic spirit is, that is to
say, now only a fiction surviving in art” (97). Krutch argues that the terminus ad quem of
tragedy is not sadness but exaltation of humanity. We celebrate human love after reading
Romeo and Juliet rather than wallowing in sadness.

McDonald: “Tragedy refers to a literary structure that moves toward an unhappy ending
and thus implies an unfavorable assessment of human experience . . . Tragedy ends in
annihilation, misery, separation, loss” (85).

Dollimore: Elizabethan/Jacobean tragedy “generates important subversive preoccupations

—namely a critique of ideology, the demystification of political and power relations, and
the decentering of ‘man’” (4). This anti-humanist, anti-essentialist subjectivity leads
necessarily to tragedy of another sort: the tragedy of all individuals. Tragedy is now the
struggle to find meaning in a world void of meaning; the attempt to find order in a world
of chaos.
 Suggested Bibliography

Aristotle. Theory of Poetry of Fine Art. Trans. S. H. Butcher (New York: Dover, 1951).

Bradley, A. C. Shakespearean Tragedy: Lectures on Hamlet, Othello, Ling Lear, and

Macbeth. 3rd edition (New York: St. Martin's: 1992)

Dollimore, Jonathan. Radical Tragedy: Religion, Ideology, and Power in the Drama of
Shakespeare and His Contemporaries. 2nd edition (Durham: Duke UP, 1993).

Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich. Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art. Trans. T. M. Knox
(Oxford: Clarendon UP, 1975).

Holman’s Handbook to Literature. 8th edition. (New Jersey: Prentice Hall, 2000).

Krutch, Joseph Wood. “The Tragic Fallacy.” The Modern Temper: A Study and a
Confession (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1956): 79-97.

McDoanld, Russ. The Bedford Companion to Shakespeare (New York: Bedford: St.
Martin’s, 2001).

Nietzsche, Friedrich. The Birth of Tragedy. Trans. Walter Kaufman (New York: Random
House, 1967).

Philosophies of Art and Beauty: Selected Readings from Plato to Heidegger. Ed. Albert
Hofstadter and Richard Kuhns (Chicago: U of Chicago Press, 1964).

Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1993).