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Scholarly commentary on Cormac McCarthy’s The Stonemason has generally coalesced around the idea that Ben Telfair’s tragic flaw negatively impacts his family, although an understanding of precisely how Ben loses his way may vary. First, the article shows how Papaw’s allusion to the works of Theodore Parker and Martin Luther King, Jr., helps clarify Ben’s moral failure. Second, analysis of two pivotal confessional scenes in Act Five highlights the significant role and agency Ben’s wife Maven assumes in guiding her husband to tragic recognition, an acknowledgment of his mistakenness and responsibility, and the need for grace and charity. After Ben’s conversion and turn toward justice, McCarthy’s drama suggests comic possibility through Papaw’s enduring example and the motif of naming and renaming, so that the play may justifiably be classified as tragicomic rather than unrelievedly tragic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Dreams are a central feature of the extended realism of Ralph Ellison’s second novel, some drafts of which have been published as Three Days Before the Shooting . . . . In this novel, dreams help Ellison’s characters realize or present truths that cannot be presented in the language of straightforward realism. In a quasi- Freudian manner, Ellison’s dream narrations reveal his characters’ and novels’ most fundamental preoccupations. In this article I analyze part of a dream sequence from Book I of Three Days. This dream, had by a white liberal character, is centered on the figure of an iron groom (or hitching-post boy) who cannot be removed from the doorway to a house. I analyze the construction and function of this dream figure and narrative through the lens of (1) Ellison’s ritualist social criticism, (2) his extended-realist, tragicomic, and syncretic aesthetics, and (3) his allusive and narrative poiesis. The iron groom is constructed as a stereotype of blackness, linked to the major black characters of the novel and to figures in Ellison’s first novel. The groom-as-stereotype is subverted through verbal “signifying” and through the development of a tragicomic narrative rhythm. The dream functions to excavate the dreamer’s (and possibly the reader’s) “self-concealed racism” and to point the way toward what Ellison has called “the mystery of our unity-within- diversity.” [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Through its mixture of similarities to and differences from typical slow cinema practices, Roy Andersson's Songs from the Second Floor (2000) offers a unique perspective on what slow cinema can be. This is apparent in the film's mise en scène and cinematography. While the use of long takes, minimalist performances and deep focus fit comfortably within slow cinema tradition, Songs from the Second Floor differentiates itself with its expansive mise en scène, vast set designs and stationary camera. The film further expands on slow cinema with its inclusion of tragicomic humour, which complements slow cinema's modernist re-appropriation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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In Edward Albee's Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1962), laughing out loud is the most common act shared by all the characters. This laughter often surfaces during moments of tension, failure, or encounters with death. The tragicomic nature of this laughter, arising from such circumstances, mirrors a postmodernist playful stance towards assertions of singularity and unquestionable truths, operating on both structural and thematic levels. The laughter characters produce may seem as inappropriate in certain situations. However, seen from a postmodernist perspective, it can be defined as an expression of scepticism towards diseased metanarratives and absolute foundations. The postmodern tendency to question and revise claims to ultimate truth finds resonance in the loud laughter of pain and relief. Within the postmodernist context, laughter transforms into an anti-foundational nonverbal expression against constraints and oppression. This paper asserts the postmodernist nature of laughter, frequently heard in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, emphasising its playful yet serious tone. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]