Product Description

Why does tragedy give pleasure? Why do people who are neither wicked nor depraved enjoy watching plays about suffering or death? Is it because we see horrific matter controlled by majestic art? Or because tragedy actually reaches out to the dark side of human nature? A. D. Nuttall's wide-ranging, lively and engaging book offers a new answer to this perennial question. The 'classical' answer to the question is rooted in Aristotle and rests on the unreality of the tragic presentation: no one really dies; we are free to enjoy watching potentially horrible events controlled and disposed in majestic sequence by art. In the nineteenth century, Nietzsche dared to suggest that Greek tragedy is involved with darkness and unreason and Freud asserted that we are all, at the unconscious level, quite wicked enough to rejoice in death. But the problem persists: how can the conscious mind assent to such enjoyment? Strenuous bodily exercise is pleasurable. Could we, when we respond to a tragedy, be exercising our emotions, preparing for real grief and fear? King Lear actually destroys an expected majestic sequence. Might the pleasure of tragedy have more to do with possible truth than with 'splendid evasion'?

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #349116 in Books
• Published on: 2001-03-29
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 128 pages

Review
"Why Does Tragedy Give Pleasure? offers a highly engaging discussion of its title question and a very suggestive answer....I would recommend that any one who wants to take his or her own run at the problem of tragedy should first spend some time engaging with the arguments in Why Does Tragedy give Pleasure?."--Review
"This delightful little book not only attracts the reader with its enigmatic title, it ensnares her into following its argument like a detective story, whose solution is not disclosed before its final pages. In a style more reminiscent of poetry than a philological treatise it deserves to be handled with care...."--Bryn Mawr Classical Review

From the Publisher
Reviewed in, London Review of Books.
`shrewd and learned book.' London Review of Book

Customer Reviews

Original, passionate, lucid
This is a great slim book not so much answering the question Why of its title but making that question deep and difficult. Nutall is direct, firm, no-nonsense, and competent in the rarest and best sense, going where he needs to go, and knowing as much as any expert about the topics which he finds himself addressing. So in considering Aristotle's Poetics, he knows what most critics don't: what Aristotle says in the Politics and the Rhetoric and elsewhere. And he knows Dr. Johnson and Shakespeare and Beckett just as well. A gem of a book.