Reviews for The Death of Tragedy

The average rating for The Death of Tragedy based on 2 reviews is 5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2012-01-29 00:00:00 Steven Mason (2016 read) It's encyclopedic on tragedy, and perhaps the main profit to be had from it is to read about lesser-known playwrights (along with those major names you've never got around to), with Steiner's superb abilities at description. It's also the best kind of writer's manual. For instance, if you want to write death scenes, here we have good deaths, bad deaths, meaningful and meaningless deaths, with Steiner's understanding and again, ability to explicate the artistic effects achieved. I still find it intensely stimulating. He is so saturated in plays that his writing effortlessly turns a phrase worthy of inclusion in them, or issues out in near-verse. When I twenty-odd he shook my confidence and I believed him when he told me tragedy is defunct to us, what with optimistic religion and optimistic politics; but even without being post both of these, there were always dissenters, not everybody goes along with the main thrust of the culture. I don't know how he explains to himself the creation of Lear (on which he is fulsome) when Christianity was prevalent. He mentions but doesn't explore tragedy in the novel; I'd say tragedy has been alive and well in the novel. Lastly, why on earth do we value tragedies if they are alien to us, impossible for us? If we live in an anti-tragic age shouldn't we toss our Shakespeare and Euripides away? This time, I also pinned him as a Classicist by temperament, so that he is hard on Romantics and harsh on late Romantics; I don't think he has the make-up to be fair to them. He was at his most compelling when explaining to me the last Classicists, Racine and Corneille. But his Classicist-Romantic dichotomy began to seem to exaggerated, too. It's as if you're in one camp or the other, but I admired the hell out of his Classicists and I'm an arch-Romantic. I never did a better thing for myself than meet this book, which has been every bit as exhilarating the second time. Even when I don't believe him. ### I'll have to read this again before I can review, but he became my God of critics. Even though you might despair when you believe/know that tragedy is the highest art and he proves tragedy impossible in the present age... Meant more to my existential growth than Nietzsche with The Birth of Tragedy.

Review # 2 was written on 2014-02-11 00:00:00 J. A. Barrons I took advantage of my fixed immobilization forced to reread some books of Steiner. I began with real presences. Death of the tragedy is more ambitious. It is somewhere an history of the literature of the Greek until us. And particularly, he wonders about the disappearance of the tragedy as literary genre. It is for him because of the Christianity, the Marxism and the psychoanalysis. Edip who is the archetype of the tragic hero, toy of the fate, becomes at Freud the hero of a rational quest in search of cure. Steiner puts texts in perspective. With his great erudition, he allows us to discover this end of the tragedy. The END? Not sure. Is the postmodernity propose to us a kind of new tragedy. There is new mythology. For exemple, when I see the TV series, not only game of thrones. I think in of television series Scandinavians (Swedish and Danish particularly), Israeli, English and some rare French, They are our new tragedies.