HENRY W. SULLIVAN. Tragic Drama in the Golden Age of Spain. Seven Essays on the Definition of a Genre. Kassel: Edition Reichenberger, 2018. 434 pp.

Reseña de Tragic Drama in the Golden Age of Spain. Seven Essays on the Definition of a Genre de Henry W. Sullivan.

Staying-at-Home with Tragedy: Self-expansion Through Narratives Promotes Positive Coping with Identity Threat

The COVID-19 pandemic created a historic opportunity to study the link between identity threat and individuals’ temporary expansion of the boundaries of the self (TEBOTS) through stories. Concurrently, the relationship between eudaimonic entertainment processes and self-expansion, particularly feeling moved and self-awareness, was examined. A quasi-experiment was conducted with an online sample (N = 172) that was randomly assigned to watch either a tragic drama or comedy. Results showed that key TEBOTS predictions were largely confirmed for boundary expansion and the outcomes of narrative engagement and entertainment gratifications. Although identity threat was negatively associated with positive coping with the pandemic, this relationship turned positive when mediated by boundary expansion. Further, exposure to tragedy raised feelings of “being moved,” which, in turn, was linked to self-perceptual depth and expanded boundaries of the self downstream. The present findings suggest that self-expansion through story consumption could benefit viewers’ positive reframing of challenging life experiences.

Paradoks Salib: Keindahan Wajah Kemuliaan Allah

An experience of the cross of Jesus Christ in Christian theology brings the sense of paradox. Christ’s death on the cross reflects the fate of humanity within the context of Christian faith. The cross is also seen as a mystery that tells the tragic story of humans who accept their punishment. However, the cross of Jesus Christ also reveals meanings that challenge Christians to find answers in their contemplation of the cross. The cross becomes a stage for human tragic drama, which might also reveal the beauty of death and life. It is the phatos of humanity, for every human being will die, but it is also seen as the tree of life hoped for by every faithful. On the cross is visible God’s self-giving through the love shown by the crucified Christ. God speaks God’s love not only through words, that is, in the teachings of Jesus Christ, but also through Christ’s loving gesture on the cross. The cross of Christ is the culmination of God’s glory and through it, God’s glory is shown in the beauty of divine love.

Tragedy and Desire

This chapter addresses the question of normative invariance vis-à-vis the desires people have for fictions, particularly tragic dramas for which one’s desires are often mutually inconsistent. One wants, e.g., for the tragic heroine to thrive and yet also for the story to culminate in her narratively mandated fate. In probing the kinds of rational constraints that may apply to one’s desires, including the apparently contrary desires elicited by tragic drama, this chapter asks whether what we want to happen within a fiction is—or should be—consistent with what we want to happen outside of it.

A alegoria como poética do (ex)combro em Manoel de Barros: uma visada benjaminiana

Walter Benjamin was one of the philosophers who most appropriately discussed the dialectics of history as a movement of extremes, that is, as an impoverished present experience before the glories of the past, which conceals, ironically, another formulation, exposed in the 9th thesis “On the concept of history”: which presents the interpretation of the allegory (ex)put in The Angelus Novus, by Paul Klee, as the “hippocratic facies of history” (Benjamin 1984), thinking this image as “the core of allegorical vision” (ibidem). Manoel de Barros, in his time, dialogues with both Klee and Benjamin, in a movement of (ex)position of episodic scenes/fragments of a nature always in a state of violence, suffering, tedium and death, despite an appearance of exuberance and abundance. In this essay, we propose to discuss/read in Barros’ poetry these poetic-allegorical constructions of nature, especially in the light of The Origin of German Tragic Drama and the thesis IX of Theses on the Philosophy of History by Walter Benjamin (1984 and 1986, respectively), as well as texts by Jeanne Marie Gagnebin (2013) and Michel Löwy (2005) on allegory in the Benjamin’s perspective.