When Tragedy Awakens Us (original) (raw)

The attraction of tragic narrative. Catharsis and other motives.

2013

A survey study was conducted to explore why people read about suffering, giving particular attention to the role that catharsis may play. Through an online questionnaire, respondents (N= 67) commented on a popular autobiographical Dutch novel about grief. The questionnaire

Emotion, Tragedy and Insight

Philosophy Study (2013)

Can the insights that poetry seems capable of providing illuminate our lives? The present study addresses this question from the perspective of Aristotle’s understanding of tragedy, fear, and the emotions more generally. It argues that and explains how fear as understood by Aristotle can foster insight in a tragedy’s audience, depicts the nature and the bases for such insight, and suggests several ways in which insight that fear brings to tragedy can be especially or particularly illuminating. The argument for these conclusions considers Aristotle’s understanding of fear in some detail, noting particularly its epistemological powers, that and how it (and also the emotions more generally) can be clarifying and bring insight (sections I-III). The argument then reflects on fear’s realisation in response to tragedy, arguing that and explaining how tragedy’s form and a number of its distinctive features shape fear in ways that more readily foster insight than is found in fear felt in more ordinary circumstances (section IV).

Postdramatic Tragedy and Fear

Narodna umjetnost: Croatian Journal of Ethnology and Folklore Research, 2020

This article engages with conceptual constellations which allow a contemporary postdramatic theatre production, specifically Socìetas Raffaello Sanzio's theatrical series Tragedia Endogonidia (2002-2004) to be regarded as a tragedy or a series of tragedies. Particular emphasis is given to the role of fear in understanding Tragedia Endogonidia as a tragedy. My claim is that Tragedia Endogonidia contributed to the modification of contemporary understanding of tragedy to, at the same time, a more abstract and a more explicitly material one, where the anchoring of the tragic into a concrete human destiny and the resolution of a plot is replaced by "plotting of the sensorial" or "plotting of the image", driven by anticipation directly related to an unspecified feeling of discomfort and fear.

Narrating Pain: The Power of Catharsis

Paragraph, 2007

This article explores ways in which narrative retelling and remembering might provide cathartic release for sufferers of trauma. It looks at examples drawn from genocide, literature, history and psychotherapy. It draws particularly from Aristotle's theory of mythos-mimesis and Ricœur's theory of narrative configuration.

The Tragic Emotions

Comparative Drama, 1999

Among the critical ideas such as imitation, catharsis, recognition, and peripety that Aristotle's Poetics has bequeathed to the world is the thesis that tragedy engenders two characteristic emotions, pity (eleos) and fear (phobos).2 Few scholars have quarreled with this proposition: but do these two feelings exhaust the range of responses typically evoked by tragedy? In what follows, I suggest that Aristotle's account is in fact deficient, and, more specifically, that Greek tragedies characteristically produce, alongside pity and fear, a sense of triumph and exultation in the audience. Furthermore, I argue that this question of the tragic emotions may have been in the air toward the end of the fifth century B.C., at a time when dramatists were experimenting with stories that simultaneously evoked the contradictory experiences of compassionate terror and victorious confidence.

Attention, Negative Valence, and Tragic Emotions

Why are we willing to pursue the putatively painful experiences that certain works of art can provide? I argue that previous discussions of the topic fail to address the nature of valence in emotional experience, and the role of attention in our engagement with representational art. Once these are more clearly understood we have good reason to reject the crucial assumption underpinning the so-called paradox of tragedy, namely, that our first-order emotional reactions to it are intrinsically negative. As such, I argue that the nature and phenomenology of our emotional experiences to negative art works is complex and determined by a number of important factors other than just the unpleasant representational content of such works. In the process of accounting for these factors I also offer a solution to the so-called paradox of fiction, which, I contend, is required in order to explain the nature of our attention to tragic art works.

TRAGEDY: - THE EXTRAORDINARY GENRE TO ARTICULATE HUMAN DISPOSITION FOR SENSIBLE OUTBURST WITH FUNDAMENTAL INSTINCTS

Research Scholar, 2015

When we think about the etymological aspects of how mankind should be differentiated from other species, the radical changes and divergence we find is knack to express oneself in an explicit manner. Especially various human moods with their feature of being ephemeral is quite evident yet the perennial and innate propensity is unmitigated particularly when we evaluate the sensitive aspect. While doing the same thing the outcome we get is not full of affectation, unreal or exaggerated. Instead we witness the grim realities which we would not have preferred to see ever. Pursuing the same notion, the sensible readers have acknowledged the genre introduced by the constellation of eminent writers. This paper provides an outlook to the historical etymology of the term ‘Tragedy’ with all its connotations, vivid interpretations with illustrations, analytical facts. It also aims at how tragic aspects may occur in anyone’s life irrespective of any incidental, situational, dispositional circumstances. We have ample examples of how tragic aspects vary with different perspectives and while describing various protagonists as well as antagonists the tragic elements have been clearly propounded by the writer.