MODERN TRAGEDY

Mughees Nasir
 Introduction
• Born on 31 August, 1920 in Wales.
• One of Britain’s greatest post-war cultural historians, theorists
and polemicists.
• Literature as manifestation of deeply rooted social process.
• Educated at Trinity College, Cambridge.
• Became member of Communist Party.
• A lecturer at Cambridge for 3 times.
 Introduction
• Modern Tragedy was written in a dense, coded prose.

• It manifests the confusion between the cultural elite and

the people.

• Dramatic and Fictional Tragedy were presented as

realizations of the “shape and set” of modern “culture.”

• Dramatists and novelists who had produced it were

assumed to represent “our” minds and experience.
 Tragedy & Tradition
• This essay is a discussion on the common and the
traditional interpretations of tragedy.

• Perception about evolution of tragedy.

• Basics of Tragedy
• It is an immediate experience, A body of literature,
Conflict of theory, An academic problem.
 Tragedy & Tradition
• Thesis in Article
• The meaning of tragedy
• The relationship of tradition to tragedy
• The kinds of experience which we mistakenly call tragic.

• What is NOT tragedy?

• The death of kings.
• Death and suffering.
• An Accident or a response to it.
 Tragedy & Tradition
• What IS Tragedy?

• It is a particular kind of event and

particular kind of response which are
genuinely tragic and which the long
tradition embodies.
 Tragedy & Tradition
• We usually try to make a contrast between the
traditional and the modern and try to compress and
unify the various thinking of the past into a single
tradition

• Tragedy is a question, not a realization of past but

interpretation of past.

• Present serves as a link b/w Traditional & Modern.

 Tragedy & Tradition
• Chorus was crucial element but discarded with
change in Greek Culture.
• The unique meaning of tragedy was lost.

• People belief about medieval tragedy.

• Yet Monk’s tale discusses fall of high ranked.

• Tragedy becomes more secular in Renaissance &

Neoclassical age.
 Tragedy & Tradition
• Contribution of Lessing (1729-81)
• A theoretical rejection of neo-classicism
• A defense of Shakespeare
• An advocacy and writing of bourgeois tragedy.

• William rejects this version.

• Shakespeare was a new kind of tragedy.
• Elizabethan: Secular, Good & Evil, Poetic Justice
• Greeks: Fully Religious Tragedy
 Tragedy & Tradition
• Hegelian view (1770-1831)

• Did not reject the moral scheme of poetic justice

• He described it as a triumph of ordinary morality.

• Mere Suffering is not important, but its causes.

• Tragedy recognizes suffering as ‘suspended over active characters entirely as the

consequence of their own act’.

• For genuine tragedy, there must be individual freedom and independence.

• This conscious individuality is the only condition of tragedy.

 Tragedy & Tradition
• Raymond Williams differentiation b/w Modern &
Ancient.
• Ancient tragedy: The characters clearly represent the
substantive ethical ends.
• Modern tragedy: Ends are wholly personal.
• Ancient tragedy: There is not only the downfall of conflicting
persons and ends in the achievement of eternal justice.
(Surrender to authority)
• Modern tragedy: the whole question of resolution is more
abstract and colder. (Reconciliation within)
 Tragedy & Tradition
• Schopenhauer (1788-1860)
• Before him tragedy was associated with Ethical Crises,
Human Growth, History.
• Secularized the idea of fate.

• True sense of tragedy is deeper insight.

• Nietzsche
• According to him, the action of tragedy is not moral, not
purgative, but aesthetic.