Tragedy and Comedy on Comedy and Tragedy

Session Submission Type: Full Paper Panel

Session Description

This panel features papers on literary works as self-reflection on tragedy and comedy as poetic modes, with a special view toward the political implications of their analyses. Covering texts from the ancient Greeks to the present day, the panel highlights the odd prominence of tragic and comedic self-questioning in works of dramatic art. What happens when tragedy and comedy examine themselves, or when they interrogate their supposed opposites? The papers on this panel contend that tragedy and comedy are not merely literary genres but offer distinctive and comprehensive answers to basic questions of political philosophy about justice, nature, and law.

This panel will attend to the broader significance of comedy and tragedy—political, philosophical, and religious—and how the the poets diverge from familiar theoretical formulations of comedy and tragedy found in Plato, Aristotle, Hegel, and Nietzsche. As the APSA 2022 theme invites us to “Rethink, Restructure, and Reconnect,” this panel will help to rethink and restructure the canon of political theory by showing how tragedy and comedy engage with its questions. As we begin to “reconnect” as scholars and as a community, this panel invites us to consider the theatre as the locus classicus of communal reflection—and self-reflection—about political life.

Paper Abstracts:

Matt Dinan, “The Bad End Unhappily, The Good Unluckily: Tom Stoppard on Comedy and Freedom”
Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead is a comedic adaptation of Shakespeare’s Hamlet. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead pulses with tragic necessity: its conclusion is announced in its title. Despite the inevitable horizon of death—Rosencrantz and Guildenstern’s and ours—Stoppard creates a comedy; more, a comedy about tragedy. While many critics consider R&G a work nihilistic absurdism, this paper argues that Stoppard upholds comedic art as an alternative to the grounds for a tragic view of life as articulated in Shakespeare’s Hamlet in the inability to achieve stable knowledge about nature, the inscrutability of divine providence, and the viciousness of human beings.

Derek Duplessie, “The Tragedy of Dionysius in Euripides’ Bacchae”
This paper will attempt to tease out a poetic rejoinder to the Socratic critique of poetry in the Republic by looking at Euripides’ Bacchae, a play which is of special relevance insofar as its hero is Dionysus, the god of tragic theatre. Through undertaking a reading of the Bacchae as a meta-poem—a tragedy about tragedy and its fraught relation to the polis—I will consider how and whether the Euripidean understanding differs from the Platonic/Socratic view.

Andrew Moore, “Marlowe’s Faustus and the Natural Order”
Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus is, formally speaking, a tragedy; indeed it is a terrible and terrifying tragedy: a world famous sorcerer (and scholar) suffers eternal damnation for his prideful pursuit of knowledge. However, the play is also filled with practical jokes, biting satire, and clownish characters. Throughout the play Marlowe explores the boundary between humour and horror. Faustus himself is a transgressive figure who makes a deal with the devil. But Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus is also a play intensely interested in the moral order of the universe and its durability in the face of human transgression. Faustus acquires extraordinary supernatural power and yet he spends his time on petty ambitions and parlour tricks. How powerful, then, is Faustus? Why does Faustus, who seems to have the power to subvert and evade the laws of nature, still suffer the natural consequences of his grasping, overreaching ambition? What might this tell us about the natural order and natural law?

Mary Townsend, “Hints, Pretexts, and Denouement: Tragic Foretelling in Thucydides’ A History of the Peloponnesian War”
In Thucydides’ Melian Dialogue, the Athenians try and fail to express the whole truth of their project to the city they intend if necessary to destroy. The Athenians state that the overwhelming force they possess has only one narrative outcome, but the Melians refuse to accept their logic, and their city falls, just as the Athenians predict. This narrative pattern has its roots in the Sophoclean logic of the exemplary tragedy, Oedipus Rex, where the prophecy that insists Oedipus will kill his father and marry his mother fails to avert the predicted disaster, just as anticipated. In classical tragedy, the inevitable provides aesthetic satisfaction. But in politics, this aesthetic is not enough, since dreadful outcomes ought to be resisted. On these grounds, the attempt of the Athenians has a certain nobility to it, despite its failures. But as Jane Austen points out, “seldom, very seldom, does complete truth belong to any human endeavor;” and in fact, direct attempts at disclosure have tragic outcomes. Perhaps, as seen in the logic of comedic disclosure, especially the romantic disclosure of Austen, plain speaking is only possible when laughter can accompany it; but if this is so, is the seriousness of politics a necessary recipe for disaster?

Sub Unit

• Division 41: Politics, Literature, and Film

Individual Presentations

• The Bad End Unhappily, the Good Unluckily: Tom Stoppard on Comedy and Freedom - Matt Dinan, St. Thomas University

• The Tragedy of Dionysius in Euripides’ Bacchae - Derek Duplessie, Assumption University

• Hints, Pretexts, and Denouement: Tragic Foretelling in Thucydides - Mary Townsend, St. John's University

• Marlowe’s Faustus and the Natural Order - Andrew Moore, St. Thomas University

Chair

• Mary E. Mathie University of Alaska Anchorage

Discussants

• Daniel Schillinger Yale University

• Catherine Craig