Tragedy since 9/11: Reading a World out of Joint by Jennifer Wallace
2020; Modern Humanities Research Association; Volume: 115; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1353/mlr.2020.0089
ISSN2222-4319
Autores Tópico(s)Irish and British Studies
Resumo Reviews conversations about what it means to write, to read, and to resist. Nguyen observes that ‘the simple act of writing about people or events or cultures that are not oen talked about constitutes already a basic kind of activism’ (p. ). So too, Interviews suggests, does talking about them: it is an extended collaborative act of call and response , not just between the various interviewers and interviewees, but between the interviews themselves, as discursive filaments connect to reveal shared concerns, ideas, and influences, like ‘patterns in a tapestry whose many colorful threads exalt in running riot’ (Rita Dove, e Penguin Anthology of Twentieth-Century American Poetry (New York: Penguin, ), p. xxxi). Foremost among these threads is the consensus that writing is a force for good, if not necessarily for change (as Harold Jaffe argues, ‘even if planet earth were not seemingly in its death throes, writing itself would be useless without collective social action’ (p. )). But for Anaïs Nin, writing offers ‘the chance to make a world’ (p. ); for Gaines, ‘literature expresses man’s feelings and relationships much better than politics’ (p. ); for John Ashbery, poetry is like a recipe kept in one’s grandmother’s head (‘it’s not necessary to understand it in order to enjoy it’ (p. )); for Nguyen, ‘the study of literature, the writing of literature, [is] not just beautiful and pleasurable; it [is] also meaningful in the political sense’ (p. ). e final interview, between Mark Yakich and Helen Prejean, ends with a reference to a description of heaven in the Book of Daniel, which concludes: ‘the books were opened’. ‘At the end of time’, Yakich grins, ‘there are going to be books’ (p. ). U B R C Tragedy since /: Reading a World out of Joint. By J W. London and New York: Bloomsbury Academic. . viii+ pp. £ (pbk £.). ISBN –––– (pbk ––––). is is a bold and ambitious book. It reads certain traumatic events in the first decades of our century through the lens afforded by the art of tragedy: / itself, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the ‘Arab Spring’ of , the massive displacement of refugees and asylum-seekers, climate change and environmental disaster. e difficult relations between the real and the fictional are at the heart of its argument that plays such as Antigone and Julius Caesar can afford us some understanding of collective crises, their causes and consequences, not least when they inform works of art that revive, revise, and rework such core narratives—in theatrical performance , dramatic and fictional rewriting, the visual arts of photography and film. Greek and Shakespearian tragedies have bequeathed to us, at least in the West, a vocabulary, perhaps even a grammar, through which we can try to make sense of what would otherwise be the brute horror of mass murder, bereavement, and exile. One of the strengths of Jennifer Wallace’s book is its fearless engagement with the most archaic concepts deriving from Aristotle about pity and terror, hamartia , and recognition. She demonstrates the extent to which they are continuingly applicable but open to endless challenge. Endlessness is indeed one of the major issues with which she wrestles, in the sense that ‘we’ continue in this rough world MLR, ., to draw our breath in pain aer Hamlet and Hamlet have ceased. History continues, tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow. So when we think of tragedy as an ongoing matter of living and dying in time, we can and should look to more contemporary thinkers than Aristotle, to Raymond Williams, Susan Sontag, Jean Baudrillard, Giorgio Agamben, and Slavoj Žižek. But we should also attend to the living and dying figures of history, to the celebrated names of Bush, Obama, and Bin Laden, and to the endless anonymous victims of enforced mass migration, few of whom attract as much attention as Alan Kurdi, ‘for a few months the world’s most famous toddler’, as Wallace puts it, drowned at sea, preserved and enshrined by a tender photograph. It is a commonplace that around contemporary history became for the first time generally readable and writable as tragedy. For the Greeks and Shakespeare it had been too risky. Now artists were provoked and emboldened to...
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