Download or read book The Seven Basic Plots written by Christopher Booker and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2005-11-11 with total page 737 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This remarkable and monumental book at last provides a comprehensive answer to the age-old riddle of whether there are only a small number of 'basic stories' in the world. Using a wealth of examples, from ancient myths and folk tales via the plays and novels of great literature to the popular movies and TV soap operas of today, it shows that there are seven archetypal themes which recur throughout every kind of storytelling. But this is only the prelude to an investigation into how and why we are 'programmed' to imagine stories in these ways, and how they relate to the inmost patterns of human psychology. Drawing on a vast array of examples, from Proust to detective stories, from the Marquis de Sade to E.T., Christopher Booker then leads us through the extraordinary changes in the nature of storytelling over the past 200 years, and why so many stories have 'lost the plot' by losing touch with their underlying archetypal purpose. Booker analyses why evolution has given us the need to tell stories and illustrates how storytelling has provided a uniquely revealing mirror to mankind's psychological development over the past 5000 years. This seminal book opens up in an entirely new way our understanding of the real purpose storytelling plays in our lives, and will be a talking point for years to come.
Download or read book Tragedy Modernity and Mourning written by Olga Taxidou and published by Edinburgh University Press. This book was released on 2004-04-28 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This powerful reinterpretation of Greek tragedy focuses on the performative - the physical and civic - dimension of tragedy. It challenges the idealist, humanist, and universalist approaches that have informed our most cherished philosophical, psychoanalytical, and modern interpretations of Greek tragedy and, in doing so, asks us to renew our relation to these works and to our literary and philosophical inheritance.The book reassesses tragic form in relation to Athenian democracy and links it with a performative discourse that both excludes the feminine and relies on civic and private forms of mourning. At the same time, it explores the centrality of tragedy for thinkers of Modernity such as Holderlin, Nietzsche, Hegel, Freud, Brecht and Benjamin. Through a persuasive analysis of both classical theorists - Plato and Aristotle - and modern theorists - Benjamin, Lacan, Kristeva, Derrida and Butler - the book significantly shifts the emphasis from a Sophoclean model of tragedy to a Euripidean one. Close readings of the performance aspects of Greek play-texts help illuminate these ideas.Features* Compelling new interpretation of Greek tragedy * Performance based * Attentive to issues of gender
Download or read book The Lessons of Tragedy written by Hal Brands and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2019-02-26 with total page 183 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A “brilliant” examination of American complacency and how it puts the nation’s—and the world’s—security at risk (The Wall Street Journal). The ancient Greeks hard-wired a tragic sensibility into their culture. By looking disaster squarely in the face, by understanding just how badly things could spiral out of control, they sought to create a communal sense of responsibility and courage—to spur citizens and their leaders to take the difficult actions necessary to avert such a fate. Today, after more than seventy years of great-power peace and a quarter-century of unrivaled global leadership, Americans have lost their sense of tragedy. They have forgotten that the descent into violence and war has been all too common throughout human history. This amnesia has become most pronounced just as Americans and the global order they created are coming under graver threat than at any time in decades. In a forceful argument that brims with historical sensibility and policy insights, two distinguished historians argue that a tragic sensibility is necessary if America and its allies are to address the dangers that menace the international order today. Tragedy may be commonplace, Brands and Edel argue, but it is not inevitable—so long as we regain an appreciation of the world’s tragic nature before it is too late. “Literate and lucid—sure to interest to readers of Fukuyama, Huntington, and similar authors as well as students of modern realpolitik.” —Kirkus Reviews
Download or read book Christian Theology and Tragedy written by Kevin Taylor and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-05-23 with total page 270 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Drawing together leading scholars from both theological and literary backgrounds, Christian Theology and Tragedy explores the rich variety of conversations between theology and tragedy. Three main areas are examined: theological readings of a range of tragic literature, from plays to novels and the Bible itself; how theologians have explored tragedy theologically; and how theology can interact with various tragic theories. Encompassing a range of perspectives and topics, this book demonstrates how theologians can make productive use of the work of tragedians, tragic theorists and tragic philosophers. Common misconceptions - that tragedy is monolithic, easily definable, or gives straightforward answers to theodicy - are also addressed. Interdisciplinary in nature, this book will appeal to both the theological and literary fields.
Download or read book On Tragedy and Transcendence written by Khegan M. Delport and published by Wipf and Stock Publishers. This book was released on 2021-10-08 with total page 326 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the time of Plato’s proposed expulsion of the poets, tragedy has repeatedly proposed a challenge to philosophical and theological certainties. This is apparent already in early Christianity amongst leading figures during the patristic age. But this raises the question: Why was the theme of tragedy still accepted and deployed throughout the history of Christianity nevertheless? Is this merely an accident or is there something more substantial at play? Can Christian theology take the tragic seriously? Must Christianity ultimately deny the tragic to be coherent, or might it be able to sustain its negativity? Some like George Steiner, David Bentley Hart, and John Milbank have doubts about such a coherency, but others think differently. This book aims to examine this debate, laying out the lines of disagreement and continuing tensions. Through a critical examination of the work of Donald MacKinnon and the eminent Christian thinker Rowan Williams, the book aims to show that there is a path for reconciling the claims of Christian orthodoxy and the experience of tragedy, one that is able to maintain a metaphysical foundation for both real transcendence and unfolding historicity, without denying either.
Download or read book What Was Tragedy written by Blair Hoxby and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2015-10-01 with total page 377 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Twentieth century critics have definite ideas about tragedy. They maintain that in a true tragedy, fate must feel the resistance of the tragic hero's moral freedom before finally crushing him, thus generating our ambivalent sense of terrible waste coupled with spiritual consolation. Yet far from being a timeless truth, this account of tragedy only emerged in the wake of the French Revolution. What Was Tragedy? demonstrates that this account of the tragic, which has been hegemonic from the early nineteenth century to the present despite all the twists and turns of critical fashion in the twentieth century, obscured an earlier poetics of tragedy that evolved from 1515 to 1795. By reconstructing that poetics, Blair Hoxby makes sense of plays that are "merely pathetic, not truly tragic," of operas with happy endings, of Christian tragedies, and of other plays that advertised themselves as tragedies to early modern audiences and yet have subsequently been denied the palm of tragedy by critics. In doing so, Hoxby not only illuminates masterpieces by Shakespeare, Calderón, Corneille, Racine, Milton, and Mozart, he also revivifies a vast repertoire of tragic drama and opera that has been relegated to obscurity by critical developments since 1800. He suggests how many of these plays might be reclaimed as living works of theater. And by reconstructing a lost conception of tragedy both ancient and modern, he illuminates the hidden assumptions and peculiar blind-spots of the idealist critical tradition that runs from Schelling, Schlegel, and Hegel, through Wagner, Nietzsche, and Freud, up to modern post-structuralism.
Download or read book Histories of Violence written by Brad Evans and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2017-01-15 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: While there is a tacit appreciation that freedom from violence will lead to more prosperous relations among peoples, violence continues to be deployed for various political and social ends. Yet the problem of violence still defies neat description, subject to many competing interpretations. Histories of Violence offers an accessible yet compelling examination of the problem of violence as it appears in the corpus of canonical figures – from Hannah Arendt to Frantz Fanon, Michel Foucault to Slavoj Žižek – who continue to influence and inform contemporary political, philosophical, sociological, cultural, and anthropological study. Written by a team of internationally renowned experts, this is an essential interrogation of post-war critical thought as it relates to violence.
Download or read book The Hardened Heart and Tragic Finitude written by Dan O. Via and published by Wipf and Stock Publishers. This book was released on 2012-11-05 with total page 259 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book has two main theses. First, for the biblical/Christian doctrine of sin the root of the human problem is hardness of heart--the corruption of the core self, of the seat of understanding and will. On the other hand, for an important strand of Greek tragedy the root of human harm-doing is the nonculpable blindness and anxiety of finitude that despite the initial nonculpability lead to evil and suffering. The Hardened Heart shows that these two different interpretations of human existence are amenable to a degree of synthesis that leads to this conclusion: hardness of heart and our ordinary finitude together collude to cause sin in its fullness. The second thesis of this volume is that exegetical studies disclose a deconstructive strand in certain biblical texts that represents the finite world that God created as a source of distress and harm-doing in something like the tragic sense. This subdominant deconstructive position challenges the dominant biblical vision, in which the creation came forth from God's creative word as good without qualification.
Download or read book The Trajectory of a Fallen Angel written by Shona Moller and published by Pallete Press. This book was released on 2017-07-01 with total page 452 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A disturbing, emotively-charged romantic thriller. This debut novel is quintessentially New Zealand; it is set on the sultry West Coast, it references New Zealand artists, and as expected from an artist author, it is an intensely visual read. The Trajectory of a Fallen Angel introduces Emma Blake, a gritty young heroine as she accepts a position at a remote village school on the West Coast of New Zealand. Tairuanui is a village of misfits; a place where everyone, it seems, is living out their Plan B. Struggling to come to terms with her past, Emma attracts the attention of Jono, an enigmatic local Maori with secrets of his own. Initially created as a feminist stance against the cardboard cut-out roles often reserved for women in literature and film, Jono eventually emerges as a fully developed character. Meanwhile, the Group; a church based on Closed Brethren doctrine is operating out of an ancient Pa site in the bush. It sets its sights on Emma and her journey to rescue, and recovery, is a bumpy ride. The Trajectory of a Fallen Angel is for readers who demand a visceral experience; Emma Blake is darkly funny, gutsy, angry. She has a blunt, sometimes abrasive first-person delivery. She approaches conflict with real passion. She discloses her sexual encounters with an open pragmatic honesty as they reflect the intensity, or lack thereof, of her relationships and the level of respect she holds for herself and for others. Emma's story allows for an intimate examination of guilt and its effects. The Trajectory of a Fallen Angel is evocative of humanity, with all its flaws and heartbreaks, and of the physical environment.
Download or read book Tragedy and Trauma in the Plays of Christopher Marlowe written by Mathew R. Martin and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-03-09 with total page 202 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Contending that criticism of Marlowe’s plays has been limited by humanist conceptions of tragedy, this book engages with trauma theory, especially psychoanalytic trauma theory, to offer a fresh critical perspective within which to make sense of the tension in Marlowe’s plays between the tragic and the traumatic. The author argues that tragedies are trauma narratives, narratives of wounding; however, in Marlowe’s plays, a traumatic aesthetics disrupts the closure that tragedy seeks to enact. Martin’s fresh reading of Massacre at Paris, which is often dismissed by critics as a bad tragedy, presents the play as deliberately breaking the conventions of the tragic genre in order to enact a traumatic aesthetics that pulls its audience into one of the early modern period’s most notorious collective traumatic events, the massacre of French Huguenots in Paris in 1572. The chapters on Marlowe’s six other plays similarly argue that throughout Marlowe’s drama tragedy is held in tension with-and disrupted by-the aesthetics of trauma.
Download or read book How Greek Tragedy Works written by Brian Kulick and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2020-12-30 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How Greek Tragedy Works is a journey through the hidden meanings and dual nature of Greek tragedy, drawing on its foremost dramatists to bring about a deeper understanding of how and why to engage with these enduring plays. Brian Kulick dispels the trepidation that many readers feel with regard to classical texts by equipping them with ways in which they can unpack the hidden meanings of these plays. He focuses on three of the key texts of Greek theatre: Aeschylus' Agamemnon, Euripides' The Bacchae, and Sophocles' Electra, and uses them to tease out the core principles of the theatre-making and storytelling impulses. By encouraging us to read between the lines like this, he also enables us to read these and other Greek tragedies as artists' manifestos, equipping us not only to understand tragedy itself, but also to interpret what the great playwrights had to say about the nature of plays and drama. This is an indispensable guide for anyone who finds themselves confronted with tackling the Greek classics, whether as a reader, scholar, student, or director.
Download or read book Conscripts of Modernity written by David Scott and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2004-12-03 with total page 291 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: At this stalled and disillusioned juncture in postcolonial history—when many anticolonial utopias have withered into a morass of exhaustion, corruption, and authoritarianism—David Scott argues the need to reconceptualize the past in order to reimagine a more usable future. He describes how, prior to independence, anticolonialists narrated the transition from colonialism to postcolonialism as romance—as a story of overcoming and vindication, of salvation and redemption. Scott contends that postcolonial scholarship assumes the same trajectory, and that this imposes conceptual limitations. He suggests that tragedy may be a more useful narrative frame than romance. In tragedy, the future does not appear as an uninterrupted movement forward, but instead as a slow and sometimes reversible series of ups and downs. Scott explores the political and epistemological implications of how the past is conceived in relation to the present and future through a reconsideration of C. L. R. James’s masterpiece of anticolonial history, The Black Jacobins, first published in 1938. In that book, James told the story of Toussaint L’Ouverture and the making of the Haitian Revolution as one of romantic vindication. In the second edition, published in the United States in 1963, James inserted new material suggesting that that story might usefully be told as tragedy. Scott uses James’s recasting of The Black Jacobins to compare the relative yields of romance and tragedy. In an epilogue, he juxtaposes James’s thinking about tragedy, history, and revolution with Hannah Arendt’s in On Revolution. He contrasts their uses of tragedy as a means of situating the past in relation to the present in order to derive a politics for a possible future.
Download or read book A Cultural History of Tragedy in the Middle Ages written by Jody Enders and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2021-05-20 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For the first time, a group of distinguished authors come together to provide an authoritative exploration of the cultural history of tragedy in the Middle Ages. Reports of the so-called death of medieval tragedy, they argue, have been greatly exaggerated; and, for the Middle Ages, the stakes couldn't be higher. Eight essays offer a blueprint for future study as they take up the extensive but much-neglected medieval engagement with tragic genres, modes, and performances from the vantage points of gender, politics, theology, history, social theory, anthropology, philosophy, economics, and media studies. The result? A recuperated medieval tragedy that is as much a branch of literature as it is of theology, politics, law, or ethics and which, at long last, rejoins the millennium-long conversation about one of the world's most enduring art forms. Each chapter takes a different theme as its focus: forms and media; sites of performance and circulation; communities of production and consumption; philosophy and social theory; religion, ritual and myth; politics of city and nation; society and family, and gender and sexuality.
Download or read book Tragedy in Ovid written by Dan Curley and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2013-07-18 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This comprehensive study establishes the importance of an unexpected genre, tragedy, in the career of the most mercurial Western poet.
Download or read book Jewish Cryptotheologies of Late Modernity written by Agata Bielik-Robson and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2014-08-13 with total page 412 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book aims to interpret ‘Jewish Philosophy’ in terms of the Marrano phenomenon: as a conscious clinamen of philosophical forms used in order to convey a ‘secret message’ which cannot find an open articulation. The Marrano phenomenon is employed here, in the domain of modern philosophical thought, where an analogous tendency can be seen: the clash of an open idiom and a secret meaning, which transforms both the medium and the message. Focussing on key figures of late modern, twentieth century Jewish thought; Hermann Cohen, Gershom Scholem, Walter Benjamin, Franz Rosenzweig, Theodor Adorno, Ernst Bloch, Jacob Taubes, Emmanuel Levinas and Jacques Derrida, this book demonstrates how their respective manners of conceptualization swerve from the philosophical mainstream along the Marrano ‘secret curve.’ Analysing their unique contribution to the ‘unfinished project of modernity,’ including issues of the future of the Enlightenment, modern nihilism and post-secular negotiation with religious heritage, this book will be essential reading for students and researchers with an interest in Jewish Studies and Philosophy.
Download or read book For More than One Voice written by Adriana Cavarero and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 2005 with total page 292 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The human voice does not deceive. The one who is speaking is inevitably revealed by the singular sound of her voice, no matter "what" she says. Starting from the given uniqueness of every voice, Cavarero rereads the history of philosophy through its peculiar evasion of this embodied uniqueness.
Download or read book Shakespearean Tragedy and Gender written by Shirley Nelson Garner and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 1996-02-22 with total page 346 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: While considering Shakespeare's earliest attempts at tragedy in Richard III and Titus Andronicus, this volume covers the major tragic period, giving special attention to Othello.
