(Routledge Research in Aesthetics) 1st Edition
by Richard Gaskin (Author)
This book offers a unique
interpretation of tragic literature in the Western tradition, deploying
the method and style of Analytic philosophy. Richard Gaskin argues that
tragic literature seeks to offer moral and linguistic redress
(compensation) for suffering. Moral redress involves the balancing of a
protagonist’s suffering with guilt (and vice versa): Gaskin contends
that, to a much greater extent than has been recognized by recent
critics, traditional tragedy represents suffering as incurred by
avoidable and culpable mistakes of a cognitive nature. Moral redress
operates in the first instance at the level of the individual agent.
Linguistic redress, by contrast, operates at a higher level of
generality, namely at the level of the community: its fundamental motor
is the sheer expressibility of suffering in words. Against many writers
on tragedy, Gaskin argues that language is competent to express pain and
suffering, and that tragic literature has that expression as one its
principal purposes.
The definition of tragic literature in this
book is expanded to include more than stage drama: the treatment
stretches from the Classical and Medieval periods through to the early
twentieth century. There is a special focus on Sophocles, but Gaskin
takes account of most other major tragic authors in the European
tradition, including Homer, Aeschylus, Euripides, Virgil, Seneca,
Chaucer, Marlowe, Shakespeare, Corneille, Racine, Lessing, Goethe,
Schiller, Kleist, Büchner, Ibsen, Hardy, Kafka, and Mann; lesser-known
areas, such as Renaissance neo-Latin tragedy, are also covered. Among
theorists of tragedy, Gaskin concentrates on Aristotle and Bradley; but
the contributions of numerous contemporary commentators are also
assessed. Tragedy and Redress in Western Literature: A Philosophical Perspective offers
a new and genuinely interdisciplinary perspective on tragedy that will
be of considerable interest both to philosophers of literature and to
literary critics.
