This chapter explores the Hegelian context of Wagner‘s works by considering the theoretical texts authored by Wagner in advance of and in preparation for his music-dramatical works. The focus is on the philosophical foundations of The Ring of the Nibelung in the politico-philosophical works Wagner wrote in the context of the Dresden uprising of 1849, in which he took part. The first section reviews the extent and import of Wagner’s theoretical writings, including State and Revolution (1849), The Artwork of the Future (1850) and Opera and Drama (1852). The second section examines the philosophical background of the Ring of the Nibelung, moving from the overt influence of Feuerbach and Schopenhauer to its deeper shaping by Hegel‘s philosophy of world history. Special consideration is given to the agreement between Hegel and Wagner in their civico-political understanding of Greek tragedy, especially Sophocles’ Theban plays, Oedipus the King and Antigone.

Friedrich Nietzsche’s relationship to Richard Wagner and his music was complex, contradictory, even paradoxical. Neither Nietzsche’s emphatic allegiance to Wagner in his early years nor his later rejection should be taken literally. The revaluation of the performative moment in cultural analysis is part of a core of thoughts that Nietzsche chewed over again and again from his first years in Basel until his collapse in Turin. His conception of the Attic tragedy is based on the assumption that the tragedy must be considered in the original context, with its cultic background and performative outcome, as opposed to the reduction of the drama to a written text, as introduced by Aristotle and continued by the Alexandrian philologists. It is here that Nietzsche demonstrates the most in common with Wagner. Yet for Nietzsche, performativity becomes a type of thinking and writing through which he ultimately distances himself from metaphysical thinking and from Wagner.

Ancient historians regularly argue that the classical Athenians held sailors in much lower esteem than hoplites. They cite in support of this the extant funeral speech of Pericles. Certainly, this famous speech said a lot about courageous hoplites but next to nothing about sailors. Yet, it is also clear that this was not a typical example of the genre. Funeral speeches usually gave a fulsome account of Athenian military history. In rehearsing military history, funeral speeches always mentioned naval battles and recognised sailors as courageous. Old comedy and the other genres of public oratory depicted sailors in the same positive terms. All these non-elite genres assumed that a citizen fulfilled his martial duty by serving as either a sailor or a hoplite. They used a new definition of courage that both groups of combatants could easily meet. In tragedy, by contrast, characters and choruses used the hoplite extensively as a norm. In spite of this, tragedy still recognised Athens as a major seapower and could depict sailors as courageous. In Athenian democracy, speakers and playwrights had to articulate the viewpoint of non-elite citizens. Their works put beyond doubt that the Athenian people esteemed sailors as highly as hoplites.

The Invention of Athens by Nicole Loraux was the first book-length study of the Athenian funeral oration. Before its publication, ancient historians had accorded little importance to this genre. Loraux established for the first time the vital importance of this almost annual speech in the formation of Athenian self-identity. She showed how each staging of it helped the Athenians to maintain the same civic identity for over a century. Yet, in spite of its impact, Loraux’s first book was still far from complete. It left unanswered important questions about each of the surviving funeral speeches. An even larger gap concerned intertextuality: Loraux rightly saw traces of the funeral oration right across Athenian literature, but she never systematically compared the funeral oration with other types of public speech as well as drama. Therefore, she was unable to demonstrate whether the other literary genres of classical Athens were ever a counterweight to the funeral oration’s cultural militarism. The principal aim of this volume is to finish The Invention of Athens. Our book answers the important questions that Loraux left unanswered. It completes the vital intertextual analysis of the genre that is missing in The Invention of Athens.

Funeral orators came to rehearse four ‘standard’ myths. The classical Athenians believed that the earliest was the victory of their ancestors against an army that the Thracian Eumolpus had led into Attica. The widely held position is that these four mythical erga were a part of the genre from its beginning. Yet, this chapter firmly establishes that this position simply does not hold when it comes to the myth about Eumolpus. Indeed, the first funeral speech to mention it was only the one that Plato wrote soon after the end of the Corinthian War. Before this, there had existed an older myth about Erechtheus, an early Athenian king, and Eumolpus fighting each other. Importantly, however, this myth presented their fight as a civil war between Eleusis, a deme in Attica, and Athens. The new myth, which, by contrast, made Eumolpus and his army foreign invaders, first appeared in Erechtheus, which Euripides wrote at the end of the 420s. As Euripides regularly changed old myths or, simply, invented new ones, Hanink argues that the epitaphic exploit about Eumolpus was originally his invention.

Nicole Loraux saw the genre of the funeral oration as ‘the spokesman of official ideology’ and even as ‘the only developed discourse that the Athenian city officially had on democracy’. Nevertheless, the funeral oration was not the only public treatment of democracy. Indeed, Athens was the only ancient Greek state in which citizens produced representations of their own regime and did so in a variety of literary genres. This chapter begins by considering the place that the funeral oration generally accorded democracy, as well as the specific democratic practices and principles that the surviving speeches mentioned. It then refutes what is, probably, the most famous argument in The Invention of Athens, namely that the funeral oration represented democracy only in aristocratic terms. Thirdly, the chapter clarifies the uniqueness of the epitaphic genre’s treatment of democracy by bringing in as comparison-points two tragedies and a famous legal speech. It concludes by drawing attention to the multiplicity of the self-portraits that Athenian democracy produced and to the ways in which the clear military function of the funeral oration constrained its portrait of the regime.

This chapter argues that the affirmative function of tragedy, by which it aligns with rather than opposes the funeral speech, has been underemphasised in recent critical trends. While this multivocal genre encompasses and promotes conflicting perspectives through which questions about the city are raised, the chapter argues that Athenian spectators viewing theatrical representations of the stories about Athens that they heard glorified annually in the funeral speeches were quite likely to interpret them as affirmations of Athenian political and military action. Moreover, the multivocality of tragedy actually enables affirmatory interpretations because spectators are always provided with ‘escape routes’ away from any uncomfortable self-criticism. This is especially true of the tragedies bringing ‘ancient Athens’ to life. Most tragedies were set outside Athens, and thus allowed spectators a degree of distance, within which questioning and criticising their own city, and especially its warmaking, could be easier.

Athens was a superpower whose ambitions required the ongoing sacrifice of men. To ensure those sacrifices were willingly made, the Athenians embraced a distinct form of ultra-patriotism, which was transmitted almost annually via the funeral speech. In this genre of public oratory, Athens was the leader and the protector of Greece, the wars that she fought were always altruistic and justified, and those who died in them were celebrated for their selfless courage. As this chapter will reveal, however, the obligation to fight was so readily embraced that most men had direct experience of combat. As a result, in Athens, the rhetoric of the funeral oration and the experience of war co-existed uneasily. On the one hand, the form of the funeral speech was determined by its function, which was to perpetuate the self-sacrifice of Athenian men. Other types of public discourse were free of such constraints, and whilst patriotism is reinforced by drama and forensic oratory, these genres could also explore the adverse human experience of war. These sometimes converging, sometimes diverging portrayals of war reveal a society that acknowledged the consequences of conflict but considered the patriotic cause worth the human cost.

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.

Chapter Twelve addresses the circulation and reception of Shakespeare’s plays in the late eighteenth- and early-nineteenth century, showing how the non-classical elements of his drama vitally contributed to Romantic-period literature and culture. Beginning with a comparison of commemorations of the Bard’s bicentenary in various European capitals, the chapter then looks at his early reception in Germany and France. While Voltaire, Goethe, and Herder celebrated him as a natural genius, French critics realigned Shakespeare’s plays according to neoclassical rules. French audiences increasingly sought out melodrama, however, and accepted these ‘irregularities’, which also inspired Beaumarchais’s Figaro plays. The chapter demonstrates the productive convergences between Shakespearean drama and melodrama, pantomime, harlequinades and other popular theatrical forms, in particular as political satire. It then looks at how Tieck and A.W. Schlegel promoted Shakespeare as the supreme playwright and as part of the German opposition to Napoleon, leading to the banning of his plays in Vienna and elsewhere, and to many literary appropriations in Kleist, Goethe, and Schiller. The chapter concludes with a survey of some of Shakespeare’s influences on drama in Italy, Spain, and, again, France.

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.