This chapter concerned with Kathy Acker’s experimental novel of 1984 Blood and Guts in High School describes the frisson between material and immaterial forms of labor for the economically disenfranchised. In Acker’s novel Janey is the concomitant tragic figure whose deathward passage from shop worker to sex slave calls forth the very origins of tragedy and tragic theory. This novel combines tragic classicism with an interest in the subsumption of sex sexuality and desire more generally. Commencing in New York City – specifically in that urban milieu’s complete degradation during the 1970s – the novel’s plot reaches outward and away from the United States to what might be described as the peripheries of geopolitical hegemony dovetailing with a story of slavery set within North Africa and the Middle East. Extending and exemplifying the fragmentation of a coherent subjectivity in the pull of neoliberal marketization this novel responds to neoliberalism with tragedy at the moment of its violent imposition as economic shock doctrine.

This chapter is about William Gaddis’ 1955 novel The Recognitionsand its depiction of creative labor in the thoroughly commercialized space of New York City’s culture industry. In this novel the classically tragic trope of recognition or anagnorisis plays out against a social backdrop of art and commerce and within a narrative whose dominant mood is comic. In this way Gaddis’ novel presents a dialectical movement between the comic and melancholicregistering tragedy above all in the stylistic shifts that occur between long stretches of dialogueon the one hand and omniscient description on the other. Here a profound melancholia registers in the exchange between the Faustian satire performed at the level of narrative content and the sincerely wrought descriptions of art studios and the urban environment. Specifically tragic affect persists within scenic descriptions of postwar New York as though to recognize the exhaustion and defeat of artists laboring under the emergent regime of consumer capitalism.

The Introduction theorizes the relationships between tragedy affect and labor within modern US fiction. Affect is key to showing how and in what forms a classical mode like tragedy persists into late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century novels. Likewise a study of the changing organization of labor – a shift in wage work toward jobs described as immaterial or affective – is central to understanding why and under which historical conditions we see the resurgence of tragedy as affect in major works of literature. Literature in this argument articulates the collective imaginary of a people in a specific time and place. The chapter proposes that the apposition of an ill-fated and newly created class of immaterial laborers during the economic and political crises of the postwar period generates a tragic structure of feeling. Tragedy resides as both a form and a feeling that are as much concerned with the fearful misery of singular characters caught up in domestic dramas as with collective suffering played out on a public (and more overtly political) stage.

This chapter is centered on a reading of Sylvia Plath’s only novel The Bell Jar (1963). Locating that novel within its author’s confessional poetry this chapter describes the relationship between reproductive labor and the creative economy as framed by the capitalist world-system at a time of geopolitical and ideological contest with the socialist states. For Plath tragic affect is born from the convergence of creative and reproductive labor wherein both types of work are subject to a process of reification: the reification of human misery registering above all in the exhaustion of a lyric voice as it is buried under the weight of a commercially viable syntax. The chapter shows how Plath’s novel combines a pervasive mood of melancholy with critical self-reflection about creative labor wherein tragedy is ultimately displaced into the realm of affect.

In this chapter on Philip Roth’s novel The Human Stain (2000) tragedy takes shape in the nexus of class and race and under the neoliberal mechanisms that enable affectively precarious types of work even in rarefied middle-class settings. The novel’s protagonist Coleman Silk is the exemplary scapegoat who pays the ultimate price for gaining membership to the institutions and structures of the American dream – all of which is revealed as harboring a nightmarish underside. In this novel suffering reads not just in relation to the unemployed or even the low-paid sectors of service and care but as a force that travels upward through the workforce into jobs that are preoccupied with not just the performance but also the bureaucratic management of feelings. The chapter concludes by drawing attention to the sort of labor involved in gaining access to the aspirational myths of the American dream as well as gesturing toward the violence that forms the underside of that dream in the first place.

If there is one author in the postwar period concerned with the formal instantiation of a reserve army of unemployed workers then that author is Thomas Pynchon whose 1973 modern epic Gravity’s Rainbow is the subject of this chapter. For Pynchon tragedy takes shape between the central and sacrificial figure Tyrone Slothrop on the one hand and a chorus of silently sufferingracialized and colonized multitudes on the other. While Gravity’s Rainbow exemplifies the comic treatment of suffering tragic affect persists in style as focus shifts from Slothrop’s individual suffering to the deracinated places inhabited by anonymous and minor characters. There prose style captures the tragedy of the collectively dispossessed.

Novelist Edith Wharton met the industrialists she called the “Lords of Pittsburgh” in high society. George Westinghouse was her neighbor in the Berkshires, where he built a dynamo that powered not only his own estate but also Wharton’s. “Edith Wharton’s Aesthetic Resources” situates the author in the context of America’s accelerating petroculture. Her novels critique a society built on new kinds of energy: petroleum, natural gas, and the fossil-fueled power stations necessary for the large-scale, continuous production of electricity. Attention to the idiom of energy in The House of Mirth and The Custom of the Country, Ida Tarbell’s History of the Standard Oil Company, and Theodore Roosevelt’s conservationism illuminates assumptions about moral agency, personal freedom, and the environment between 1880 and World War I. Wharton’s allegories of energy interrogate externalities or consequences of industrial activities that affect outside parties, not reflected in the cost of production.

Global histories of the 1970s tend to presume a division between revolution and counterrevolution, described as a transition from hope to despair. Prevalent frames of analysis obscure aspects of history specific to Iran. Part I poses an alternative. It asks whether definitions of revolution and counterrevolution overlap and, in turn, whether avenues for revolutionary action may arise through loss.

This chapter is on the triangular relation between romance, tragedy, and decolonization as both themes and tropes in African fiction. The primary concern in the chapter is the work of the novel in the late colonial period and first decade of independence in Africa when the genre was tied closely to the politics of cultural nationalism. A key premise in the chapter is that the turn to the novel among African elites was bifurcated. On one hand, the genre attracted African elites in the late colonial period because they assumed that the genre would best register the tragedy of colonization, notably its cultural deracination, its destruction of subjects, and its denial of African agency. On the other hand, the novel was often asked to help African subjects imagine a future beyond colonialism. The novel in Africa came to be structured by the need to develop a language in which the tragedy that was seen as a defining characteristic of colonial history and the lived experience of colonized subjects, would be countered by the romance of a future that the novel as a genre was imagining and willing into being.

This chapter examines how Sophoclean tragedy approaches and conceptualises the relationship between divine and mortal. It demonstrates that Sophocles builds on the early Greek theological, philosophical and literary tradition outlined in Chapter 1, but steers his own, distinctive course. It argues that Sophocles’ tragedies deploy ideas and beliefs about humans and gods in three, closely interconnected ways: in the explicitly theological and philosophical discourse uttered by characters and choruses; in the trajectories and experiences of individual characters on the stage; and in the broader, religious and ethical patterns that underlie these trajectories, which are occasionally and partially revealed to audiences. As part of its attempt to foreground the close interrelation of dramatic structure, form and content, the chapter devotes considerable space to a new interpretation of dramatic irony. This general discussion relies on readings of four Sophoclean plays, Oedipus Tyrannus, Ajax, Philoctetes and Oedipus at Colonus, as well as on brief comparative analyses of some Aeschylean and Euripidean examples.

This chapter introduces the main argument and themes of the book, and positions it within earlier and existing scholarship on archaic and classical Greek literature, religion and philosophy. Particular points of focus include the relationship between Greek tragedy, ritual and theology, and influential mid-twentieth-century research on Sophocles (the ’classics’ of Sophoclean scholarship). The chapter also discusses ancient biographical traditions surrounding Sophocles’ religiosity and piety.

Akin to Aristotle’s attempt in the Poetics to lay out the various conditions of artistically rendered human action that make for the most gripping treatments, Hegel develops a poetics of action that attempts to articulate what makes for the most beautiful artistic presentations of action. This chapter focuses on this “poetics of action,” and it is argued that the key to understanding Hegel’s aesthetic privileging of heroic action in his poetics lies in the peculiar ontology of the artwork itself: that is, it is argued that the decisive, transformative events that are the focus of scenes of heroic action in effect provide art with that express content that most readily fits with the artwork’s own deeper nature as such a transformative event in its own right. The chapter explores various of Hegel’s specific aesthetic judgments about dramatic settings, characters, narrative structure, and the role of ethics in art, in each case arguing that the basis of these judgments is oriented both in terms of the heroic and in terms of what enables the character of a transformative event to become most manifest.

This chapter treats the aesthetics of human action. It begins by taking up athletic contest in particular, for insofar as the performance of athletic action serves to make conspicuous how an otherwise given, natural body becomes the vehicle for a striking realization of spirit’s freedom and autonomy, its eventful unfolding can serve as a kind of aesthetic standard for assessing the other forms of action as well. However, most of our actions prove to be rather lackluster in comparison, and when Hegel turns to the aesthetic prospects of practical life in the context of modern civil society and the state, he finds only what is prosaic, action here being defined on all sides by contingency, dependence, and exposure to external forces. Hegel would have us see that the aesthetic limitations of practical life are rooted in inherent, ontological limitations of practical life itself – what this chapter calls the tragedy of the practical – implying that there is no question of seeking a higher form of practical life that would be free of such limitation. This limitation is surpassed only by redefining ourselves, not exclusively in practical terms but in the terms of “absolute spirit,” whose first form is art.

Characters curse storms, power blackouts and climate change sceptics in twenty-first century drama as the destructive force of climate change is theatrically represented across comic farce, realist tragedy and dystopian horror. While these theatrical forms differ in their affective and emotional impact, they commonly predict ecological disaster in the future. Disaster is broadly understood as the combination of historical and social determinants interacting with natural hazards and forces over time. Climate change disaster is framed in scenarios that range from humorous to terrifying and with a growing dramatic genre of futuristic climate fiction (cli-fi) about ecological collapse and political dystopia. Twenty-first century dramatisation presents both the absurdity of humanity’s inability to reduce carbon emissions and global warming and the tragedy of predicted disaster on a geological scale in the Anthropocene. At the same time, contemporary performance illuminates turning points in time turning points in time including a different outcome within the present including within the present.

This essay examines the oracular responses of the oracle of Dodona portrayed in fifth-century BCE Attic tragedies. This analysis explores the wording of the oracular answers, characterized by extreme conciseness and clarity, and the topic of the queries, on household security, family matters, and final journeys. The evidence from the lead tablets at Dodona corroborates this focus, showing that while the oracle addressed various concerns, a significant number of private queries dealt with family, health, marriage, and travel. Additionally, the responses from Dodona were brief and straightforward, in contrast to the cryptic nature of Apollo’s oracles at Delphi.

Chapter 5 thus turns to the “old quarrel between philosophy and poetry”. Whereas my starting point in Chapter 4 was the paradox of the written critique of writing, here I begin with the apparent contradiction of Plato’s mimetic critique of mimesis in the Republic. For Gadamer, Strauss, and Krüger, this is key to understanding Plato’s critique of poetry: Plato does not condemn mimesis entirely. Instead, he subordinates the imaginative and persuasive powers of imitative poetry to philosophical goals and thus weaves poetry and imitation into his own masterful compositions. All three readings point differently but decisively to the limits of autonomous or unaided philosophical discourse, and therewith anticipate some of Heidegger’s insights on the necessity of something like poetic thinking.