Search

Copyright of Germanoslavica - Zeitschrift für Germanoslawische Studien is the property of Slovansky ustav AV CR, v.v.i. and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This article considers The Merchant of Venice in the context of the early modern credit economy, a space in which shared trust and values mediated transactions. Shakespeare’s play depicts a version of this economy while revealing its limits. Because religious differences and mutual animosity prevent them from forging an informal agreement, Shylock and Antonio agree to a binding contract enforceable by law. When Antonio defaults, the state must enforce the terms of the bond to protect Venice’s status as a hub of international trade. As communal relations falter and the state fails to intervene effectively, the play seems to veer toward tragedy, but nevertheless arrives at a “happy ending” thanks to Portia’s machinations and duplicity. By imposing a comic resolution onto serious subject matter, Shakespeare dramatizes the inability of both the credit economy and the state to regulate financial activity and resolve attendant conflicts in increasingly commercial and cosmopolitan societies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the presence and manifestation of tragedy as a literary genre in Romanian literature until the establishment of the communist regime. My analysis begins with an overview of the arguments that various critics, playwrights, and essayists have invoked in trying to explain the alleged absence of tragedy in Romanian culture and continues with a discussion about the errors and confusions inherent to such a position. Starting from these misconceptions, I propose a new definition of tragedy as a dramatic/theatrical genre and then employ that definition in identifying the most important tragedies in Romanian literature from the second half of the 19th century and the first half of the 20th century. The conclusion of my article, strongly contradicting the dominant idea in the history of Romanian drama studies, is that tragedy not only existed in Romanian literature, but that the genre represented a fundamental coordinate of the Romanian cultural tradition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Suffering occupies a central place vis-à-vis both melodrama and tragedy, and draws attention to their closeness, despite considerable efforts to distinguish between them. The multiple relations between tragedy and melodrama become clearer when we reflect deeply on the place and role of suffering. My goal in this essay is to cast some light on how suffering works around the edges of melodrama, even as it produces melodramatic performance, in a way that accentuates the tragedy of suffering. I do so by narrating a painful ethnographic vignette from a project on Indigenous displacement, to illuminate how suffering both generates melodrama as well as flickers around its edges, reflecting the multidimensional character of melodrama itself. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Investigaciones Historicas is the property of Universidad de Valladolid, Facultad de Filosofia y Letras and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This text analyses María Zambrano's reading of Stoicism between 1937 and 1958, paying attention to its changes and to the value that the author concedes to Senecan Stoicism as a tool to understand the Spanish and European context. In addition, it is defended the relevance of Zambrano's reading of Stoicism through the comparison with Michel Foucault's view on it. One of the most interesting results of this comparison is the potential of Zambrano's philosophy to intervene effectively in the contemporary debate on humanism, providing arguments for a renewed and critical defense of humanism with respect to the anti-humanist postulates that Foucault formulated. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

On October 1, 2022, the Kanjuruhan Football Tragedy in Malang, Indonesia, marked a poignant event, drawing significant media coverage, particularly by The New York Times. This incident, involving the police, supporters, and the government, unfolded amidst complex dynamics of action and response. This paper aims to dissect the media portrayal of these entities, examining the nuances of representation in news narratives. Adopting Van Leeuwen's (2008) Critical Discourse Analysis framework, the study employs a qualitative methodology to analyze how Social Actors are depicted through inclusion and exclusion strategies, alongside the portrayal of Social Actions through action and reaction approaches. The analysis of The New York Times' coverage reveals that the police were frequently portrayed as the enforcers of security, often resorting to measures like firing tear gas, while the supporters were depicted as reacting to these measures and significantly impacted by the tragedy. The government was represented as the overarching authority, responsible for managing the situation and its aftermath. This study uncovers a multi-layered narrative in the news discourse, highlighting the complexity of representing different actors in high-impact events. It concludes that media narratives in such scenarios are intricate, often shaped by the interplay of various actors' roles and actions. The findings emphasize the need for comprehensive discourse analysis in understanding media representations, suggesting future research should extend the scope of analysis by integrating broader elements from Van Leeuwen's framework and other Critical Discourse Analysis theories to gain deeper insights into media portrayals in similar situations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper considers the usefulness of tragedy as a historical source, specifically on the question of personal freedoms in fifth-century Athens. The underlying methodological principle is that we must consider tragedy as drama before we consider it as evidence. The paper looks first briefly at free speech and then, at greater length, at freedom of movement, with a specific focus on the movement of female characters. Through an examination of first entrances in the extant plays, I try to uncover what assumptions were shared between poet and audience about a woman’s ability to leave the house and enter the public spaces of the city. Within the limitations of the evidence, it appears that (1) tragic women almost always make their first entrance from the stage building in plays where that building represents a house or palace, and (2) there are social constraints on the freedom of unmarried women in tragedy. However, there are frequent variations from this pattern. Tragic freedoms and unfreedoms emerge as contestable and subject to perceived social status. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A literary criticism of the tragedy "Macbeth" by William Shakespeare is presented. Topics discussed include Shakespeare's use of rhetoric to portray the extremes of emotion of the character Macbeth, the oratorical features of the If It Were Done soliloquy of Macbeth, and the movement of Macbeth's speech which reflects his agony.

The Spanish Golden Age tragedy is assembled around the conflict of passions, which does not find an adequate channel of expression in words because there are feelings that cannot be confessed if one wants to preserve life. However, such intense emotions cannot be hidden for a long time, either. The characters discover that the eyes speak in silence and cannot lie, so they appeal to their sincerity at crucial moments. Such examples can be found in the declarations of love addressed to inaccessible or forbidden women or in the narratives of women who report sexual assault or husbands who believe they have been dishonored. In this article, we will analyze all these circumstances to demonstrate that, if they contradict the lips, the eyes are the windows of the soul, and they speak a language that is as expressive as it is eloquent. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The dynamics of Georg Lukács's development and divergent scholarly perspectives are reconsidered in light of his little-read 1909 dissertation, The Developmental History of Modern Drama. This long early work, with its detailed methodological apparatus, establishes a baseline of comparison for his later and better-known works, especially in Soul and Form (1911), The Theory of the Novel (1916), and History and Class Consciousness (1923). This framework can reconnect Lukács's early theory of literary genres to contemporary debates on form in literature, epistemology, and political and social theory. Attention to the systematics of Lukács's earliest historical-transcendental criteria of literary form allows his genre poetics to be understood more flexibly than has often been assumed. The difference between novel and modern drama, for example, is not categorical but functions as a differential of protagonists' possible forms of agency and autonomy in a world defined by passivity and heteronomy. The political subtext of Lukács's early theory of the tragic pursues a double agenda of historical symptomatics (defining tragedy as the genre of a class achieving consciousness of its own decline) and existential radicalization (totalizing onstage and offstage tragedy as the pinnacle of aesthetic experience and the heroic rupture into a new historical era). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Several attempts have been made to demonstrate that Shakespeare knew and drew from the anonymous university drama Caesars Reuenge in writing Julius Caesar. This article revisits the question of influence, making the case that Reuenge not only influenced certain particulars of Shakespeare's play but also helped to shape its general structure and suggested some of its major themes. Following the introduction, the first part situates Reuenge , performed by the students of Trinity College, Oxford, within its academic context, and examines the crucial matter of dating, arguing that it precedes Shakespeare's Caesar tragedy. The second part treats the minor and major parallels between the two plays and demonstrates the ways in which Shakespeare's academic predecessor seems to haunt the familiar plot of Julius Caesar. A brief conclusion considers what this might indicate about Shakespeare's relationship with the universities, a subject of increasing scholarly attention. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With its glorified ghost, godly avenger, and idolatrous Tyrant, Thomas Middleton’s The Lady’s Tragedy appears to offer a thinly veiled allegory of Protestant triumphalism. Little attention has been paid, however, to how its characters do — or do not — respond to the play’s many crises of conscience. This essay sets Middleton’s tragedy against English Protestant understandings of the trembling body and vexed conscience. It demonstrates that while the play’s multiple instances of trembling seem to unsettle its Protestant triumphalism, its special effects, intended to provoke audience trembling, might nevertheless deepen playgoers’ attachment to the Protestant cause. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Philip Massinger’s The Duke of Milan (1621) clearly sits in the tradition of the Elizabethan and Jacobean Italianate tragedy and is resonant of stories, ideas, theories, and characters from Italian history and its literary tradition. This essay discusses the play as one of the earliest examples of Massinger’s interest in Italy and its culture. It investigates the play’s Italian setting and examines the influence of the Italian cultural and political legacy to offer new insights into the development of Anglo-Italian relations and England’s home and religious politics in the early 1620s. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Western studies of the Russian response to Shakespeare's political tragedy after the October Revolution of 1917 have traditionally focused on Hamlet and paid little attention to the fortunes of Macbeth. This article argues that early Soviet Russia saw Macbeth as a play that sent a revolutionary message to its audiences and offered an ideologically useful vision of the world re-made by political violence. It explores the competition for control over the readings of Macbeth in early Soviet Russia by analysing the allusions to Macbeth in texts produced by those troubled by the violence of the October Revolution and the responses to these allusions from the supporters of the Bolshevik regime. Examining the two stage interpretations of Macbeth produced in the first post-revolutionary years, this article suggests that the ideologically minded directors and critics ultimately lost that competition and were forced to abandon the project of locating the October Revolution in the play as unprofitable. I propose that the absence of this tragedy from the central Soviet stages from the mid-1920s and throughout the intensely ideological Stalinist era can then be read not as neutral disinterest but as an active apprehension of its potential for subversive political messaging. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, I challenge Simon Critchley's recent suggestion that tragic art is not morally educational in Aristotle's analysis and instead argue that it can be inferred from Aristotle that tragic art can morally educate in three main ways: via emotion education, by helping the audience come to understand what matters in life, and by depicting conduct worthy of moral emulation and conduct that is not. Stephen Halliwell's reading of how catharsis helps the audience of tragedy learn to feel pity and fear appropriately is discussed. Two objections Lear makes to Halliwell's account are thereafter outlined and responded to. I maintain that for Aristotle, the pleasure proper to tragedy is prompted by an understanding of what matters most in life—not making mistakes that threaten the prosperity of loved ones. I pull the article together by questioning aspects of Christopher Falzon's reading of Ruben Östlund's film, Force Majeure. I conclude that the film both exemplifies and critiques Aristotle's account of moral learning through tragedy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Eugene O'Neill's autobiographical tragedies, such as Dynamo, Days Without End, The Iceman Cometh and More Stately Mansions, are characteristic of the misogynistic murder motif. In these tragedies, the male protagonists actually kill or are motivated to kill their mistresses, wives and mothers. We argue that this unique phenomenon is in essence a matricide in disguise, which originated from August Strindberg's philosophy of misogyny and O'Neill's own adolescent psychological trauma. The revelation of O'Neill's misogynistic murder motif and its genealogical origin from the perspective of biographical criticism helps to explicate the dramatist's sense about the tragic fate of human beings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article highlights the lack of Black representation in the assigned reading lists for middle and high school English language arts (ELA) courses. It discusses how traditional reading lists predominantly feature white-centered narratives and often portray Black characters in tragic contexts, neglecting to showcase the vibrancy and diversity of Black literature. It emphasizes need for a more inclusive and representative curriculum that incorporates Black speculative authors and narratives.

This article explores the relationship between gender and history in Nicolas de Montreux's historical tragedy La Sophonisbe (1601), specifically how the drama uses the historical female figure of Sophonisbe to negotiate what it means to take part in history. By engaging Walter Benjamin's notion of the chaste martyr and her affinities with history in the German Trauerspiel, the article draws novel attention to historico‐philosophical elements in Montreux's drama and begins an analytical exploration of the often noticed but unexplored question in modern scholarship of gender in French humanist drama. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Alcestis is a dramatic play that oscillates due to its content between the definition of a tragedy and a satirical drama. This characteristic influences the matter treated by Euripides: the death of the protagonist in benefit of her husband, a situation that can be interpreted as a gratuitous act --pure love for Admetus--, or else as a result of the social condition of the main character, who comes from the ancient aristocracy and responds to the dramatic interpretation carried out in the context of Athenian democracy (438 B. C.). The objective of this article is to analyze the most evident passionate, ethical and sociopolitical implications of Alcestis's dilemma at accepting her premature death before in order to keep Admetus alive. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The isiXhosa translator of Shakespeare's Macbeth, B.B. Mdledle, introduces the play as intlekele (a tragedy), and goes on to discuss characteristics of the genre; he cites Fate and Fortune as two forces that are vital ingredients of tragedy. The role of the witches' equivocal prophecies is key here. In Mdledle's Transkei (Eastern Cape), the issue of prophesying was taken very seriously - not least because of the prophets Makhanda, alias Nxele, and Nongqawuse, who plunged the region into untold disaster in the nineteenth century. This article also considers Mdledle's UMacbeth (1959) as a form of intsomi (fable or cautionary tale), both for schoolchildren and for older readers. Furthermore, it relates the supernatural elements in Macbeth to Mdledle's views as a Christian and to African cultural paradigms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drama, more obviously than other genres of art, is a form of play; and play, according to Johan Huizinga, is essentially autotelic, or not a means to an end. Shakespeare's plays are trivialised if they are seen essentially as means to other ends. Science conceives of the material world as an endless chain of causes, just as utilitarianism demands that all human artefacts and endeavours take their place on an eternal chain of purposes. This model devalues all its elements, for they acquire their worth only in terms of what appears next along the chain, never in or of themselves. The model is also counter-intuitive, since human experience values things, people and events differently from one another. Some items give us more pause than others; a few invite us to lose ourselves, as a child becomes lost in a game. Drama asks an audience to play along with its playing actors, pointlessly. If there is a point - moral or utilitarian - it is a mere side effect. A play, like Cleopatra's hopping, is a digression from the straight journey of human lives toward death; and, as Freud suggests in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, detours are the only places in which the life drive makes any inroads into the death instincts' relentless onward progress. Shakespeare's dramatic works not only demonstrate play, and hook their audiences into the delightful, terrifying and all-absorbing world of (the) play, but they also provide a metanarrative about play, playing with the idea of playing. This essay resists the tendency to interpret Shakespeare's dramatic works pragmatically, and instead shows, with examples from comedies and romances, especially The Tempest and A Midsummer Night's Dream, and from tragedies including King Lear, Macbeth, Hamlet and Antony and Cleopatra, how they refuse to be means toward other ends, but "play till doomsday", throwing reflective aspects up to their audiences and defying the puritans to stop them as they do so. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The palimpsest of Romanisation of Greek Drama was a constant and imperfect negotiation between the playwrights and largely Attic Greek texts often transmitted through the intermediary of non-Attic Greek communities in Italy and quite possibly through new performance of the plays. The playwright faced the task of making the material immediate and understandable to an audience in Rome with its own expectations and within the special circumstances in which the Latin version was commissioned and performed. There are, as well, degrees of Romanisation. The fabula palliata would have had a visual, declared connection to Greek culture, while the fabula togata would have put on a Greek play in Roman dress, centering the reception more on contemporary Rome. The fabula praetexta, drawing on Roman history, had its own set of special circumstances. Imperial drama, for which Seneca is the fullest witness, melded a both Latin and Greek versions of plays to which the poet added his own interpretation of the material. This is no more apparent than in the Octavia and Hercules on Oeta where the debts are as much to Seneca as to Greek models and traditions. For the greatest utility, this paper organizes material by the broad categories of subject matter, as this should make clear which inheritances of the Greek past most interested Roman audience and the patrons who paid for productions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Evangelista Fossa, a friar of the Order of the Servants of Mary who lived at the end of the 15th century, composed two interesting vernacular translations: one of the first nine eclogues by Vergil (1494), the other of the first part of the Agamemnon by Seneca (1497). The translation of the eclogues served him as a model for the translation of the tragedy. The purpose of this contribution is to highlight the traits of style of the vernacular pastoral poetry that Fossa applies to the tragedy. The final section is dedicated to the reception of Fossa’s Agamennone by a contemporary author, Pizio da Montevarchi. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In conversation with tragic readings of Saul's career, the present article attempts to outline a parallel between the presentation and role of the spirit of YHWH and the evil spirit which afflicts Saul in 1 Samuel. By highlighting the parallel between the two spirits, the following argument suggests that they fulfil similar roles in confirming election and rejection respectively and either empowering or debilitating their recipients. The suggestion is that this analogy offers an appropriate way to understand the wider presentation of the evil spirit which afflicts Saul and has important implications for how we think about Saul's rejection and his presentation more broadly. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article discusses antigone. a requiem (2019) by the Austrian playwright Thomas Köck as one of the latest contributions to a growing body of work that has engaged with Sophocles' Antigone in light of current migration debates. Avoiding psychological realism in favour of postdramatic techniques, antigone. a requiem differs aesthetically from other recent revisions in that this tragedy-as-requiem does not primarily aim for the audience's affective response. Inspired by Judith Butler's theory of the spectral return of socially neglected, ungrievable lives, the play replaces Antigone's unburied brother with corpses washed ashore on European beaches to question European migration policies through a critical assessment of Europe's necropolitics. Formally recomposing Sophocles' tragedy as a requiem with a distinct linguistic musicality, Köck's play skilfully repurposes the funeral song shared by Sophocles' Antigone and chorus and relocates Antigone's anagnorisis to the chorus of contemporary Europeans who eventually recognize themselves in the dead. Köck's requiem also decomposes its model, as it stages the undead as revenants who return to remind Europe of its history of colonization and exploitation, in which Sophocles' Antigone was employed as a carrier of European values. In this respect, Köck's recomposition also sings a requiem for Antigone itself. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In Nineteen Eighty-Four Orwell imagines a world in which tragedy and the kinds of human value on which (in Orwell's view) it depends have ceased to be possible. The novel's principal character, Winston Smith, sees them as belonging to an earlier era of private and unquestioning loyalties. However, fully to register the impossibility of tragedy involves seeing the novel as representing not merely an attempt on Winston's part to disrupt an oppressive system that happens to fail (for tragic value might still attach to the attempt), but as showing a world in which failure has ceased to be meaningful. This situation is ensured in the world of the novel by the operation of an official doctrine that can be described as idealism on a materialist base. The Party insists that perception constitutes reality, and can be remoulded by the Party's command of psychologically expert forms of mind-reading and mind-control. This psychological expertise relates to several features of the novel (such as the salience of dreams), and points to the possibility that the novel does not show a serious attempt to challenge the Party's regime, but only its normal functioning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Emma Stebbins's untraced statue The Lotus-Eater (c.1857–60) purports to illustrate Alfred Tennyson's poem of the same title, in turn derived from an episode in the Odyssey of Homer. This essay addresses the tension between Stebbins's sculpture and Tennyson's text. It brings to the discussion a body of antique visual and literary material to which Stebbins had access, images of and references to Antinous, the youthful and tragic lover of the Emperor Hadrian. Although the great flowering of Antinous scholarship and critique for queer men developed later in the nineteenth century, this study argues that the material was readily available for Stebbins, particularly through the writings of Johann Joachim Winckelmann and the objects in Rome, where she worked; later authors, such as John Addington Symonds, developed their commentary and fiction on Antinous from the same sources. The article brings together the thematic and visual resonances, references, and overlaps between the texts and images. It uses close attention to the formal qualities of the sculpture and the content of Tennyson's poem to consider roads not taken, and how those options demonstrate the ambiguity in Stebbins's finished sculpture: that is, its lack of clear moral or didactic content through its selection of the lotus-eater and Antinoan imagery, rather than a martial or moralizing figure from the poem. It demonstrates the complexity and subtlety of Stebbins's selection of sources for her sculpture, and her rich, multivalent play between texts and images. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

After Hurricane Maria had passed, Puerto Rico found itself in the eye of a media whirlwind due to governmental scandal and earthquakes; still, bomberas (women bomba practitioners) would continue organizing. This article examines how in the wake of catastrophe, and since its inception on sugar plantations in Puerto Rico, bombeando (practicing bomba) offers individual healing and prompts the mobilization of Afro–Puerto Ricans on the island and in the States. Bomba is thus a system of mutual relief, which offers a model of structural repair. I examine how bombera pedagogy is more than something to be applied to a genre of music and dance but a lifestyle and practice that acknowledges, repurposes, and releases wreckage of the embodied experience of colonial trauma. Drawing on practices of care in the Black feminist tradition, I deploy ethnography to render how bomba allows scholars to collectively reimagine and address interpersonal and infrastructural violence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We propose in this article to contribute to the expansion of the interpretation of Oedipus the King, by Sophocles, beyond the Freud's indication that it anticipated the Oedipus Complex. We will argue that this play has an important political and religious content as well as a psychological one, as Hölderlin defends based on a highlight of a moment in the plot that Freud quotes with a little mistake: it was not the oracle that associated the plague with the murder of Laius, but Oedipus, who could have read the advice to "Ban out the blemish of the city" as a simple statesman, but he did so too infinitely. Thus, his "hamartia" (error) was to have been driven by the "nefas" (excess) of wrathful curiosity, which led him to mix religion (infinite) and politics (finite), and to mischaracterize both domains. We will also disagree with Freud that there is an "opposition between destiny and will" in the myth: there is, rather, an identity between them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Paralympic and Para sport representation has provided an important cultural site from which to explore the role of popular disability media in shaping everyday disability knowledge(s) through relations of power, ideology and meaning. Yet limited attention has been afforded to the affective dimensions of Para sport media that may help extend our understanding of its performative power on audiences. In critique of the recent Netflix Paralympic documentary film, 'Rising Phoenix', this article affords particular attention to the production of disability affects through the cinematic entanglement of things, bodies and language that work to involve audiences on an affective, emotional and sensorial level. Drawing on Sara Ahmed's (2004) cultural politics of emotion, it is argued that the film produces an economy of disability affects that contribute to the qualitative affective qualities of the film yet operate to (re-)configure sites of disabled normativity, gendered disability relations and nourish 'supercrip' and 'medico-tragedy' disability narratives. Attention is paid to the implications of this and the role of sport documentary film more widely in generating affective modes of representation for marginalised sporting groups. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents Charles Vion d'Alibray's Préface to his translation of Prospero Bonarelli's tragedy, Solimano. Vion's long préfaces to his French translations of contemporary Italian theatre - to Tasso's Aminta and Torrismondo, and to Cesare Cremonini's Le pompe funebri, here reproduced and commented are a significant testimony of the theatrical querelles between 1620 and 1640. Prospero Bonarelli's Solimano is the last Italian text translated by Vion (1637) and, unlike the other tragedies, it seemed that it was published without a preface (so it was reprinted in modern times). However, Soliman's preface has finally been found: curiously, it was printed in a few examples of the same edition, with the same Privilège du Roy. It is a rich and interesting text, containing references to letters written by Bonarelli himself, and above all explicitly aware of the particular moment when Solimano was translated: the moment when the "temps des Préfaces" evoked by G. Dotoli was dissolving, while Corneille's "temps" begins, dominating the French scenes with the first, stunning performance of his Cid, as Vion himself admits and declares. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Resulta interesante considerar ciertas reelaboraciones del mito de Antígona en el marco de la relación entre irracionalismo y tragedia durante el contexto del exilio y de la posguerra civil española. Tanto La tumba de Antígona de María Zambrano como La sangre de Antígona de José Bergamín señalan—a partir de sus semejanzas y también de sus diferencias—una cierta conciencia sobre el declive de la razón. Asimismo, la diversa valoración que exhiben con respecto a la existencia de un nuevo saber experiencial—de herecia unamuniana—ayuda a comprender el contraste de ambas miradas sobre la tragedia como fuente de conocimiento. It is interesting to consider certain reworkings of the myth of Antigone in the context of the relationship between irrationalism and tragedy in the context of exile and the post-Spanish Civil War period. Both La tumba de Antígona by María Zambrano and La sangre de Antígona by José Bergamín point out—from their similarities and also their differences—a certain awareness about the decline of reason. Likewise, the different valuation they show in relation to the existence of a new experiential knowledge—of Unamunian heritage—helps to understand the contrast of both views on tragedy as a source of knowledge. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Andrew McGahan's final novel, The Rich Man's House (2019), collates many of the preoccupations of his literary career: power, the environment, and the precarious foundations of colonisation in Australia. This paper posits that the novel's commentary on human overreach is an alternative history that encapsulates the Anthropocene and explores the problematic, gendered dimensions of conquest and its representation. Situated within a broad and growing literary scholarship that explores the innovative application of ecological frameworks, the paper interrogates the novel's critique of intersecting erasures of coloniality, masculinist domination and historical certitude. It suggests that the disaster visited upon the characters of The Rich Man's House is a demonstration of a specific phenomenon: ecologist Barry Commoner's fourth rule of ecology - nature always bats last. This paper also contributes to scholarship on McGahan's oeuvre, noting that his final work is prescient in its awareness of increasing climate disaster. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper narrates a history of the August 2, 1968 Luzon earthquake that severely hit the capital city of Manila in the Philippines. The central site of this earthquake disaster was the collapse of a premiere, high-rise residential building in downtown Manila, the Ruby Tower Apartments. This tragedy reflects the projection of nationalism in terms of collective disaster response, and the Philippines' complicated dealings with a specific segment of the population. The Ruby Tower tragedy was an emblematic representation of the country's disaster response capacities and Filipino society's perception and treatment of the Chinese and Filipino Chinese residents in Manila. Using newspapers, magazine articles, and scientific reports about the earthquake, this study aims to present a microhistory of a cultural minority in Manila, specifically on how the sordid story of earthquake disaster survival projects a poignant picture of ethnic dynamics and disaster politics in the country in the 1960s. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article rereads Norton and Sackville's Inns of Court tragedy Gorboduc (1562) in the light of its neglected preoccupation with fire. It posits the 1561 lightning strike on St Paul's as a critical context for the play's emphasis on fire as a motor of providential justice, through the repeated evocation of the myth of Phaethon, and locates its use of fire in performance at the intersection between political intervention and carnival festivity. Noting the play's coevolution with the fire pamphlet genre, the article suggests that these ephemeral works' commentary on the relationship between fire and tyranny, in line with sixteenth-century resistance theory and de casibus tragedy, illuminates how Gorboduc's interests manifest in popular discourse, and allows an interpretation of the play's imagining of rebellion which foregrounds the irony of its rhetoric of stability and obedience. In dialogue with recent work on the Pyrocene and European pyrophobia, and its implications in relation to Giorgio Agamben's understanding of civil conflict and the state of exception, the article broadens the existing picture of Gorboduc's resonance, to read it not just as pivotal in the development of English drama and political theology, but as contiguous with wider patterns of thought in premodern disaster response and narratives of collective action. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

From 9/11 to the Boston Marathon, from Charlottesville to the Capitol Riots, from Sandy Hook to Parkland, from Eric Garner to George Floyd, from Hurricane Katrina to widespread wildfires. In the span of just two and a half decades, the United States has been plagued by numerous tragic events. During the same period, the number of late-night shows, a simple though controversial measurement of popular demand for comedic material dealing with or distracting from these crises, proliferated from four shows in 2000 to 17 in 2020. Looking at these shows over the course of two decades (2001–2021), the paper examines if and how late-night hosts addressed tragic events, a topic thus far largely relegated to grey literature. The empirical study draws on theories of comedy and tragedy to inform its content analysis of late-night monologues. The article finds that late-night hosts did address a wide range of tragic events, from mass shootings to environmental catastrophes. However, the ways in which they did so differed, exhibiting shifts over time and comedic genre. Overall, late-night comedians’ replies to tragic events became more instantaneous, serious, and civically minded. The article argues that this subversion of genre expectations through the absence of humor and increasing incorporation of political accountability and advocacy frames in comedians’ responses to tragedies became particularly pronounced in the late 2010s. The paper suggests potential explanations for these results and concludes that these findings provide valuable insights and implications for the American public and policy discourse. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the responses of Welsh poets, writing in both English and Welsh, to nuclear power in the period after the Chernobyl disaster of April 1986. Fall-out from Chernobyl contaminated upland areas of North Wales adjacent to the country's two nuclear power stations, Trawsfynydd and Wylfa, prompting a backlash against the nuclear industry. Welsh poets played key roles in the anti-nuclear movement during the 1980s and 1990s, writing poems that respond both to the Chernobyl disaster and to nuclear threats closer to home. Furthermore, we trace the long aftermath of Chernobyl in the poetry of R.S. Thomas and Robert Minhinnick, which is frequently contaminated with the imagery and vocabulary of nuclear disaster. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Beginning with Iago's insults against Cassio as both "arithmetician" (1.1.18) and "counter-caster" (1.1.30), this essay explores the deep epistemological divides that the two terms suggested in the period. The essay turns to another mathematical conceit in the play, the word "gross." Although suggesting stupidity, stolidity, and other terms of weight, the paper locates the associations of "gross" within debates on mathematical representation in the period. The essay focuses on the term gross in the period's mathematical handbooks, particularly in John Dee's preface to Euclid's The Elements (1570). It shows how Dee is juggling complex epistemic issues in positing a third category between the material and the immaterial. This third category, mathematics, relies upon metaphors of the gross and ideas of movement in order to gain a foothold in Dee's cosmic system for all forms of thought. The essay thus shows how Shakespeare's tragedy picks up on the mathematical and representational difficulties of the term "gross" to both point to and play with the productive limitations of language. In Othello 's persistent use of "gross" to describe the inability of representation to fully reach its auditors, the essay uncovers a similar concern with the gaps between language and mental apprehension. Both mathematics and Othello , that is, traffic in the concerns over what is gross, what can never be gross, and characters' need to imagine objects and ideas as gross in order to theorize computations. [K.W.] [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay argues that Edmund Spenser makes a major intervention in the Renaissance reception of the Hippolytus myth: he joins the classical imitation of humanist poetics with the theological arguments of the post-Reformation Church. Spenser forms his Hippolytus story from familiar sources, including Virgil's Aeneid , Ovid's Metamorphoses , and Boccaccio's Genealogia deorum gentilium. But he also owes, as we show, a significant, underestimated debt to Seneca's Phaedra. Spenser derives from it a language of fragmentation and tragedy relevant for both the inset narrative in Faerie Queene I.v.37–40, as well as the book's larger representation of Redcrosse's spiritual renewal. Spenser develops his revision of Seneca, we suggest, through the mediation of Prudentius, who in Peristephanon XI had already combined Hippolytus' classical with his Christian significance. Prudentius adapts Seneca's Phaedra to narrate the dismemberment of St. Hippolytus, a third-century martyr whose bodily reliquiae were enshrined in Rome's catacombs. Like Prudentius for a late antique Spenser rewrites the Hippolytus story for the Reformed Church, representing a second Hippolytus no longer worthy of veneration. The result is a Spenserian myth more capacious in its classicism and theology than scholarship has acknowledged previously. Revising Senecan tragedy and Prudentian martyrology, Spenser extends his imitation beyond the familiar sources of Augustan poetry, his critique beyond the familiar target of Roman Catholic works. [J.E., D.A.] [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Along with other printed items (such as journals, novels and textbooks), newspapers were instrumental in connecting different sectors of Chinese society in the early twentieth century, creating what Benedict Anderson calls 'a homogeneous empty time' for the Chinese. In this article, I will examine one commonly used strategy to increase readership – national disaster. As the late Qing government was confronting a series of crises (such as the palace coup d'état of 1898, the Boxer uprising of 1900, the death of Empress Dowager in 1908), newspaper publishers presented these crises as a continuing saga that revealed the doomed fate of their country. To show the effectiveness of this strategy, I focus on Zhengyi tongbao (1902–1908). Edited and published by Deng Shi (1877–1951), the newspaper was a hodgepodge of official documents, news columns, and political commentaries. What linked these different parts of the newspaper together was the urgency of national crisis. As I will show, Deng Shi was effective in using national disaster to attract readers' attention. At one point, he even offered readers substantial discounts if they renewed their subscription ahead of time to avoid missing the new episodes of national disaster. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]