Drawing on philosophical and psychoanalytic methods of interpretation,
Richard Kuhns explores modern transformations of an ancient poetic
genre, tragedy. Recognition of the philosophical problems addressed in
tragedy, and of their presence up through eighteenth- and
nineteenth-century philosophical texts, novels, and poetry, establishes
a continuity between classical and modern enactments. Psychoanalytic
theory in both its original formulations and post-Freud developments
provides a means to enlarge upon and inform philosophical analyses that
have dominated modern discussions.
From Aeschylus' classic drama The Persians to the hidden tragic themes
in The Merchant of Venice, from the aesthetic writings of Kant to
Kleist's narrative Michael Kohlhaas, Kuhns traces the writing and
rewriting of the themes of ancient tragedy through modern texts. A
culture's concept of fate, Kuhns argues, evolves along with its concepts
and forms of tragedy. Examining the deep philosophical concerns of
tragedy, he shows how the genre has changed from loss and mourning to
contradiction and repression. He sees the fact that tragedy went
underground during the optimism of the Enlightenment as a repression
that continues into the American consciousness. Turning to Melville's
The Confidence Man as an example of Old World despair giving way to
New World nihilism, Kuhns indicates how psychoanalytic understanding of
tragedy provides a method of interpretation that illuminates the
continuous tradition from the ancient to the modern world. The study
concludes with reflections on the poetry of Walt Whitman and Emily
Dickinson. Each poet's celebration of the body, and the contribution of
the senses to reason, perception, and poetic intuition, is seen as an
embodiment of the modern tragic sensibility.
