Judge William of Kierkegaard’s Either/Or claims that the Jutland Pastor’s sermon expresses exactly what he had tried to say in his letters. This is far from obvious to the reader, and I suggest we bypass the Judge, reading the sermon directly with A’s essays on unhappy love and tragedy. Like the sermon, Part I’s “Shadowgraphs” deals with the psychology of persons who have (apparently) been wronged by someone they love and the defenses they construct on the beloved’s behalf mimic classic theodicies. The Pastor’s “practical theodicy,” which consists in thinking of ourselves as the wrongdoers, can be applied to their predicament as well. Yet imagining what that would mean in an abusive interpersonal relationship shows how perilous the Pastor’s theodicy is, alienating us from our own ideas of good and bad, right and wrong. A’s treatment of tragedy offers an alternative. Recognizing that God (or the beloved) is indifferent or simply evil restores our moral-emotional integrity.

What are we to make of the sermon at the end of Either/Or? How does it stand in relation to the book’s preceding presentations of aesthetic and ethical life? Why is it presented under the title, “Ultimatum”? This chapter takes up these questions by showing how the sermon, and the fictional Jutland priest to whom it is attributed, serve to represent a certain development within ethical subjectivity. On the reading I develop, the sermon represents, namely, a way of trying to sustain a stance of participation in ethical life, in the face of experiences of human powerlessness and exposure to tragedy, without despair but also without succumbing to illusions of ethical independence. So understood, the sermon offers a perspective that, while it incorporates elements of both, provides a third alternative to the tragic outlook of “A” in Either/Or’s Volume 1 and the letters of Judge William in Volume 2.

Heidegger, in the 1946 essay Letter on Humanism, famously remarks that the tragic dramas of Sophocles are in some sense superior to the philosophical ethics of Aristotle in their ability to “preserve” the site of human dwelling in language. This chapter first offers a reading of Aristotle’s Ethics, suggesting in what sense they might be deficient, from Heidegger’s perspective. Next, Heidegger’s reading of Sophocles’ Antigone in the 1942 lecture course Hölderlin’s Hymn “The Ister” provides our focus, and we find there a poetization of the site of human dwelling, as opened up by a play between homeliness and unhomeliness, familiar order and uncanniness, presencing and absencing. Thirdly and finally, we ask precisely how Sophocles’ poetizing manages to preserve this dynamic play and, moving beyond Heidegger, we suggest that Antigone herself, as she moves through the plot of Sophocles’ play, eventually and dramatically models how humans properly inhabit this site as such, in her questioning way of thinking and in her hesitating way of taking action.

This chapter describes theatrical responses to France’s defeat in the Seven Years’ War (1756–1763), often described by historians as the first global war. This is achieved through a close reading of the dramatic text and performance history of Pierre-Laurent de Belloy’s Le Siège de Calais (1765), which was pitched by its author as France’s “first national tragedy” and used by government officials to rally French subjects around their country and their army. The play was vital in creating through theater a new relationship between French subjects and the nation’s armed conflicts. De Belloy’s success was predicated on his manipulation of new forms of “bourgeois” and “sentimental” drama, and the play went on to inspire more soldier plays and war dramas. The chapter concludes with an examination of the tragedy’s reverberations throughout the French empire by way of parodies and public readings of Le Siège de Calais in fairground theaters and military garrisons.

This chapter addresses Nietzsche’s early exposure to pessimistic thought from the late 1860s to early 1870s, and aims to elucidate his philosophical articulation of pessimism as an individual and cultural problem to be solved. It argues against the view that Nietzsche was, at this time, a straightforward Schopenhauerian and pessimist. The chapter pays special attention to the ‘problem of quietism’, interpreting The Birth of Tragedy as concerned to speak to this problem, distinguishing Nietzsche’s strategy from competing strategies offered by the likes of Schopenhauer, Hartmann, Bahnsen, as well as pessimism’s opponents. After interpreting the notion of an artistic ‘justification’ as a solely pragmatic one for Nietzsche, the chapter ends with a discussion of the Untimely Meditations and Nietzsche’s evident early concern for the problem of suffering’s meaning.

Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald was every 5′3 ½″ a lady, but she outdrank men from Montgomery to Manhattan to Marseilles. Her short stories were so good that, sometimes, they appeared under her husband Scott's name. She was a gifted painter whose work was mostly bought out of pity, lost forever because it was unsigned and often given away, and burned by a protective, possibly jealous sister. She was a gifted dancer who began in earnest too late and never got a real chance. She was an early feminist heroine. She has inspired classic fantasy-action video games, lines of clothing, agenda-driven biographies, and novels from the beautiful to the damnable. She is catnip to movies and television series and is the current subject of two major biopics, starring Jennifer Lawrence and Scarlett Johansson. The legends of Zelda go on and on, from shortly after her birth in 1900 to the present day, and surely beyond. Yet the truths of Zelda, as we can find them, are much finer and more meaningful than all the legends they still beget. It is time to realize how much they can round out, and also increase, the legend.

This essay seeks in Tracy an account of dialogue as the first hope of post-war forgiveness and reconciliation, for the author’s own troubled setting of post-civil war Croatia. Despite Tracy not having written on reconciliation after conflict, ‘a Tracyean route to the hope of dialogue’ takes shape here via Tracyean emphases on ‘history’, ‘tragedy’, and ‘fragments’. Dialogue becomes theological here not solely on account of religious contexts widely present in Croatia, but also, after Tracy, whenever dialogue approaches its proper goals and reach. In ‘a practical-historical context of despair and violence’, recent works by Tracy helps by: (1) highlighting the value of a tragic sensibility within culture and Christianity; and (2) proposing hope around strong fragments (or ‘frag-events’). In an innovative application of Tracy, some of the most powerful Croatian fragments are those ordinary inhabitants whose lives are witness to the country’s collective failures in addressing ongoing experiences of extraordinary injustice and suffering. It is to them that dialogue must be exposed if Croatian society is to open itself towards a divine Infinity of hope and forgiveness.

This chapter addresses the book’s first question by focusing on the Realist critique of classical Pragmatism. This insists that political interests corrupt processes of social learning and argues that power determines how best practice (and the public good) is defined. This criticism was levelled directly at Dewey by his contemporaries, especially Morgenthau and Niebuhr, and it continues to inform neorealism. Inspired by Dewey’s response, the chapter argues Pragmatism is not blind to power or self-interest, it simply emphasizes, like contemporary IR constructivists, that understandings of the self (its identity and its interests) are not fixed; they are instead contingent on the self’s experience of interacting with its material and social environment. The normative implication for Pragmatists is that theorists should render that process intelligent by subjecting it to ‘conscientious reflection’. That process is a political one to the extent access to a community of inquiry is contingent on power. Part of the Pragmatist ‘vocation’ is a commitment to balancing political power by supporting Deweyan ‘publics’: those who are indirectly affected by practice but excluded from the relevant communities of practice. The chapter concludes by reflecting on the implication for key concepts in Realist and Pragmatist thought, including tragedy, prudence and learning.

This chaper takes the account of democracy developed in chapter three and considers it in the context of his critique of American democracy in the 1960s through a reading of King Lear. Cavell’s distinctive contribution to aesthetics is his claim that tragedy is a site that works through the implications of skepticism as it relates to the other. Cavell’s interpretation of tragedy contributes to three important debates in contemporary political theory. First, King Lear’s tragic abdication exposes the crisis in authority that results from post-sovereign politics. Second, Cavell’s claim that acknowledgement rather than knowledge is the appropriate response to tragedy makes an important intervention into recent debates in political theory over the politics of recognition. Third Cavell’s analysis of tragic downfall underscores important shifts in consciousness that a society must undergo in order to realize justice. Under this reading, the political import of tragedy is as a pedagogy for a politically repressed culture that spurns necessary changes in cultural self-understanding.

“Negotiating Whiteness” draws on the work of critical race studies scholars and whiteness studies scholars to present my book’s main argument and outline its core theoretical concept: the “intraracial color-line.” Shakespeare’s plays disrupt the common understanding of the Black/white racial binary in ways that have implications for modernity regarding the uncivilized, less-than-ideal white self. In Shakespearean drama, this figure serves two functions: The white other is an embankment that keeps “good” white people in check by demarcating the ever-shifting boundary between what the ideal white self should and should not be or do, by showing the costs of “bad” whiteness; and the white other figure embodies non-somatic blackness, constantly reifying anti-black and anti-Black discourse. By centering critiques of whiteness, I isolate the kinds of intraracial tensions that underscore the instability of racialized whiteness and that emphasize the need for understanding how that instability depends on upholding whiteness as superior.

Shakespeare’s White Others’ conclusion engages The Comedy of Errors to reaffirm how race always matters. I argue that The Comedy of Errors’ concern with mistaken identity resonates with the modern Black experience. While considering my book’s preoccupation with the effects of racism, othering, anti-Blackness, and racial profiling, I turn to Patricia Akhimie’s Comedy of Errors criticism to consider how one can be “bruised with adversity” not just physically, but also psychologically. The conclusion’s title plays on the name of Shakespeare’s comedy because, as I see it, anti-blackness and anti-Black racism position white people, including white others, in opposition to Black people in what feels like a comedy of (t)errors: a space that is a genre of its own and akin to Negro-Sarah’s funnyhouse environment in Adrienne Kennedy’s Funnyhouse of a Negro. Racial tribulation is a life sentence tied to the Black existence.

In 1824, Mary Russell Mitford’s historical tragedy, Charles the First, was banned by the new Examiner of Plays, George Colman. In 1737, William Havard’s play, King Charles I was performed at the Theatre Royal in Lincoln’s Inn Fields, just before the 1737 Licensing Act established legislative State censorship of the British theatre. There is an intriguing timeline here: in 1737 a play about Charles I ran for several months at a Theatre Royal, and was subsequently played throughout Britain for the next fifty years; in 1824 another play about Charles I was banned before it reached the stage. These events bookend the period covered by this book, and this chapter works between them to explore aspects of the cultural memory of Charles I in the English theatre, and the impact of censorship not only on Mitford’s career but also the broader question of women’s participation in the theatre in the early nineteenth century. Mitford’s playwriting career spanned the end of John Larpent’s time and the start of George Colman’s tenure as Examiner of Plays, and her experience points to the increasing constraints on women playwrights’ agency and confidence in the period.

This chapter aims at the sort of overview that the editors of ANRW then encouraged, and brings together the place of poetry in sophists’ education; an account of the many various poetic genres in which sophists composed, with citation of what we have from the only one of these genres to have survived, epigram; and epigrams on sophists composed by others.

While it is only recently that disgust has been (re)assessed as a category of analysis for the Early Modern period, its temporalities are in need of further investigation. The chapter argues that disgust is triggered and represented by material memory objects in Hamlet and Othello. Here, disgust serves as affective response to the pressure of seemingly paradoxical temporalities – Hamlet’s experience of a past that is embodied in the untimely object of the skull, and Othello’s experience of a ‘future anterior’ that is mediated by and manifested in the handkerchief, respectively. In the two plays, the temporality of disgust is paradoxical: it simultaneously lags behind the memory object from which it recoils and generates the object in the very act of recoiling. By reading the respective temporalities of disgust both tragedies display, I suggest that the affective dynamics of disgust find literary analogy in the structural dynamics of both Hamlet’s and Othello’s fundamental dramatic conflict.

This chapter argues that Longus highlights important features of his work that contrast with tragedy. The preface’s intertexts with Antigone and Hippolytus are crucial. The latter focuses attention on how to manage ἔρως, alerting us to differences in its presentation by Longus and by tragedians. The inset tales’ myths – divine lust leading to a young woman’s destruction or metamorphosis – present a story-type drawn upon by Attic tragedy and more generally by Greek narrative poetry. In confining destructive ἔρως to his inset tales, explicitly called μῦθοι, ‘myths’, Longus contrasts gods’ actions and mortals’ sufferings in traditional myths with their handling in his own story. Tragedy neither explores stories of mutual and symmetrical desire, nor presents positive images of female desire, both of which are crucial to the discourse of the novels. Longus plants a clue to this verdict on tragedy at 4.17.2, where Astylus, expressing surprise at Gnathon’s wish to have sex with a goatherd, ὑπεκρίνετο τὴν τραγικὴν δυσωδίαν μυσάττεσθαι, ‘acted out revulsion at the foul smell of goats’: the dramatic term ὑπεκρίνετο alerts the reader to the double entendre in τραγικὴν δυσωδίαν, which with the addition of the iota subscript often omitted in imperial Greek epigraphic and papyrus texts becomes τραγικὴν δυσωιδίαν, ‘the unpleasant singing of tragedy’.

This chapter offers a short sketch of poetic output with special reference to the Roman provinces Achaea and Asia, and with an eye on how far we can differentiate ‘professional’ poets from virtuoso amateurs.

This chapter first walks readers through Kant’s critical theory of the sublime before tracing this Kantian sublime in a selection of German Romantic-period cultural texts. One of Caspar David Friedrich’s most famous paintings, The Monk by the Sea, and Heinrich von Kleist’s equally awesome review of it, are read through a (post-)Kantian lens. The chapter then explains how Kant’s model of the sublime was decisively re-interpreted by Friedrich Schiller, whose idea of the ‘pathetic-sublime’ made the concept amenable to poetics, particularly so with respect to tragedy and questions of free will and fate. The chapter closes with a discussion of the sublime in German Romantic-period music, focusing on Beethoven’s Fidelio and Ninth Symphony, with the words of the final chorus from Schiller’s Ode to Joy.

Chapter 10 offers a way through, not by opposing poverty, but reframing it. Being poor in world and captivated by its technological environment, marks the regress of humans from homo faber to animal laborans; but while the latter still could locate the self within a cosmic and divine order, all such locating is now forfeit. Our second reading of poverty, aided by Samuel Beckett’s play Krapp’s Last Tape, however, embraces the possibility of new beginning; the wind that stirs and in whose uneven gusts the potential for the revision of the self emerges.