From the Publisher
Eagleton suggests that for postmodernists who think unity of purpose is an illusion, tragedy simply highlights the fact. Certainly, an enduring point of tragedy is that some tragic events serve no obvious purpose.”—Nick Mattise, Insights Magazine
OCTOBER 2020 - AudioFile
Critic Terry Eagleton’s richly detailed and wide-ranging commentary on literary tragedy calls for an attentive ear and a narrator who is clear, steady, and unobtrusive. Irish-American narrator Roger Clark has already performed two of Eagleton’s titles. Clark, who studied in the U.K., has a heavy British accent reminiscent of the late actor James Mason. Given a narrative that routinely references names like Sophocles, Racine, and Goethe, he performs as if addressing Parliament. Eagleton is provocative, enlightening, a banquet for the mind. Even so, this is an audiobook that may appeal only to a specialized audience. D.A.W. © AudioFile 2020, Portland, Maine
Kirkus Reviews
2020-06-30
Noted literary scholar Eagleton limns the literary genre of tragedy, “an aristocrat among art-forms.”
The author is among the most influential Marxist students of literature, and though he is by no means doctrinaire, he does locate the political dimension in tragedy, which, he holds, “began life as a political institution,” a vehicle by which the ancient Greek polis asserted and reinforced its values. The old joke that comedy is what happens when you fall down a staircase, while tragedy is what happens when Ifall down that same staircase, doesn’t quite land with Eagleton, who finds much more serious elements in the transformation of tragedy into a kind of anti-politics, now a sort of repudiation of the workaday world in favor of something more elemental and exalted. Still, the old models hold: Sophocles’ Oedipus at Colonusaffirmed the creation of a political institution while the Oresteiacommemorated the transition of the polis from a vendetta-based system of justice to an actual legal system. Eagleton can be snippy about some of the figures that appear in his analysis, such as the principal actor of the New Testament. “There is nothing in the least noble or edifying about the squalid death of its low-life protagonist,” he writes, “a death traditionally reserved by the Roman imperial power for political insurgents.” Jesus as low-life is a curious formulation. Similarly, Eagleton rejects some of the noncathartic events that are commonly pegged as “tragic” today, such as the Holocaust. He links the tragic movement as a manifestation of free will: Jesus, whom he later elevates from his former scorn, did not have to appear at Golgotha to take his place on the cross, and neither did Agamemnon have to slay Iphigenia. The clash between “fate and freedom,” as he puts it, is really an argument between different ideas of freedom and a reminder that though we may be free, we are not always in charge of our lives.
An accessible, provocative, and philosophically rich view of a primal literary expression.
