First published in 1975, The Psychology of Tragic Drama offers an interpretation of some of the themes of both ancient and modern tragic drama through an investigation of the plays in the light of psychoanalytical ideas. In his introduction, the author explains and defends the application of psychoanalytical insights to the study of literature. Then in the first part of the book, he proceeds to an exploration of some primitive and infantile situations expressed in Euripides’ Bacchae and in a group of modern dramas by Strindberg, Pinter, Ionesco and Weiss. In the second part he turns to the drama of Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides, tracing the psychological history of Orestes and Electra from their Greek originals to their later re-creations in more modern settings, in the plays of O’Neill, Eliot and Sartre, and comparing the treatment of themes and motifs which also reappear in Macbeth and Hedda Gabler. In conclusion, Patrick Roberts discusses the loss and gain involved in the diffused awareness among modern dramatists of psychoanalytical ideas and influence; indeed, the book as a whole stands as a confirmation and expansion of Freud’s comment ‘that poets and philosophers before me discovered the unconscious’. As such, it will appeal not only to all students of serious drama but to all those interested in the two disciplines of literature and psychoanalysis.

Dr. Bennett Simon provides a psychoanalytic reading of Aeschylus' Oresteia, Euripedes' Medea, Shakespeare's King Lear and Macbeth, O'Neill's Long Day's Journey into Night, and Beckett's Endgame, six plays from ancient to modern times which involve a particular form of intrafamily warfare: the killing of children or of the possibility of children.

This book offers a resolution of the paradox posed by the pleasure of tragedy by returning to its earliest articulations in archaic Greek poetry and its subsequent emergence as a philosophical problem in Plato's Republic. Socrates' claim that tragic poetry satisfies our 'hunger for tears' hearkens back to archaic conceptions of both poetry and mourning that suggest a common source of pleasure in the human appetite for heightened forms of emotional distress. By unearthing a psychosomatic model of aesthetic engagement implicit in archaic poetry and philosophically elaborated by Plato, this volume not only sheds new light on the Republic's notorious indictment of poetry, but also identifies rationally and ethically disinterested sources of value in our pursuit of aesthetic states. In doing so the book resolves an intractable paradox in aesthetic theory and human psychology: the appeal of painful emotions.

First published in 1960, The Paradox of Tragedy raises the fundamental question, why do we enjoy tragic drama with its themes of death and disaster? Aristotle’s theory of catharsis is still widely accepted as a satisfactory explanation of this paradox. In the first of its two connected essays, D.D. Raphael argues that Aristotle’s account of tragic emotions is distorted by a faulty psychology and fails to solve the problem. Raphael offers instead a new theory of Tragedy, as a conflict between two forms of the sublime, in which the sublimity of human heroism is exalted above the sublimity of overwhelming power. The spirit of the Tragedy is liable to conflict with doctrines of Biblical theology, and the difficulties of fusing the two are explored with illustrations from Greek, Biblical, English, and French literature. The second essay discusses the wider topic of philosophical drama, considering in what sense tragic and other forms of serious drama may be called philosophical, and also pointing out the dramatic shape of much of Plato’s philosophy. In this discussion, the question of religious Tragedy reappears in a different perspective. This book will be an essential read for scholars and researchers of philosophy in general and political philosophy in particular.

We might think we are through with the past, but the past isn't through with us. Tragedy permits us to come face to face with the things we don't want to know about ourselves, but which still make us who we are. It articulates the conflicts and contradictions that we need to address in order to better understand the world we live in. A work honed from a decade's teaching at the New School, where 'Critchley on Tragedy' is one of the most popular courses, Tragedy, the Greeks and Us is a compelling examination of the history of tragedy. Simon Critchley demolishes our common misconceptions about the poets, dramatists and philosophers of Ancient Greece - then presents these writers to us in an unfamiliar and original light.

GREEK DRAMA and the Invention of Rhetoric “An impressively erudite, elegantly crafted argument for reversing what ‘everybody knows’ about the relation of two literary genres that played before mass audiences in the Athenian city state.” Victor Bers, Yale University “Sansone’s book is first-rate and should be read by any scholar interested in the origins of Greek rhetorical theory or, for that matter, interested in Greek tragedy. That Greek tragedy contains elements properly described as rhetorical is familiar, but Sansone goes far beyond this understanding by putting Greek tragedy at the heart of a counter-narrative of those origins.” Edward Schiappa, The University of Minnesota This book challenges the standard view that formal rhetoric arose in response to the political and social environment of ancient Athens. Instead, it is argued, it was the theater of Ancient Greece, first appearing around 500 BC that prompted the development of formalized rhetoric, which evolved soon thereafter. Indeed, ancient Athenian drama was inextricably bound to the city-state’s development as a political entity, as well as to the birth of rhetoric. Ancient Greek dramatists used mythical conflicts as an opportunity for staging debates over issues of contemporary relevance, civic responsibility, war, and the role of the gods. The author shows how the essential feature of dialogue in drama created a ‘counterpoint’—an interplay between the actor making the speech and the character reacting to it on stage. This innovation spurred the development of other more sophisticated forms of argumentation, which ultimately formed the core of formalized rhetoric.

Is philosophy, as the love of wisdom, inherently tragic? Must philosophy abolish its traditional modes of thinking if it is to attain the wisdom of tragedy? Sharing a common origin, even direction, does philosophy move beyond tragedy, epitomizing it? Is the action of tragedy analogous to the activity of philosophy? Have Hegel and Nietzsche distorted the tragic? Can there be a philosophy of the tragic? It is with such questions that the essays of this volume become involved, coming up with original interpretations of tragedy, new approaches to traditional views, and novel conceptions of philosophy. Their diversity and novelty emerge out of a common problematic, a theme they all address: the relation between philosophy and tragedy. By exploring this relation, this volume adds to our comprehension of both..