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The Function of Criticism and Tragedy
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 23 October 2024
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When Walter Stein, in his book Criticism as Dialogue, proposes his version of criticism and takes it into the area of tragedy, we are challenged to reconsider some essential notions. It is when faced with tragedy, perhaps, that criticism meets its most exacting responsibilities; what it makes of tragedy reveals its inner nature most clearly. What, then, are we to make of Stein’s argument that the demands which criticism faces are nothing less than metaphysical? What do we say to the various stages of his argument?
Do we agree, for example, that in Arnold we have a key-figure who fails to meet these demands and whose work can be characterized by such words as ‘reductio’ and ‘surrender’?
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- Copyright © 1941 Provincial Council of the English Province of the Order of Preachers
References
page 367 note 1 Walter Stein, Criticism as Dialogue, Cambridge, 1969.
page 367 note 2 Stein, p. 5.
page 367 note 3 Stein, p. 38.
page 367 note 4 Stein, p. 48.
page 367 note 5 Stein, p. 50.
page 368 note 1 Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy, New York, 1956, p. 92.
page 368 note 2 Stein, p. 96.
page 368 note 3 Stein, p. 107.
page 369 note 1 L. C. Knights, Some Shakespearean Themes, London, 1960, p. 101.
page 369 note 2 Wilson Knight, The Wheel of Fire, London, 1962, p. 197.
page 369 note 3 A. C. Bradley, Shakespearean Tragedy, London, 1962, p. 276.
page 369 note 4 Bradley, p. 210.
page 369 note 5 Bradley, p. 239.
page 369 note 6 Bradley, p. 245.
page 369 note 7 Bradley, p. 226.
page 370 note 1 Bradley, p. 254.
page 370 note 2 Bradley, p. 255.
page 371 note 1 Johnson on Shakespeare, ed. Raleigh, Oxford, 1965, p. 158.
page 371 note 2 Boswell, Life of Johson, ed. Malone, London, 1821, II, p. 176.
page 371 note 3 Gerard Manley Hopkins, ‘No Worst, there is None’, Selected Poems, London, 1961, p. 65.
page 372 note 1 Bradley, p. 271. I am influenced here by Dr Wilbur Sanders' Cambridge lectures on ‘Shakespeare and the Heroic’.
page 373 note 1 Norman Mailer once expressed the wish to see Lear acted by Ernest Hemingway.
page 373 note 2 Stein, p. 151.
page 374 note 1 Wordsworth, ‘A slumber did my spirit seal’, Poetical Works, Oxford, 1913, p. 187. From questioning the sense in which King Lear can be said to be a tragedy, we are led to ask just how many tragedies Shakespeare wrote; the word is used loosely by critics, but there is no reason to assume that all the plays conventionally called tragedies are so, in the full sense of the word‐they can still be about tragedy.
page 375 note 1 Raymond Williams, Modern Tragedy, London, 1966, p. 59.
page 375 note 2 Stein, p. 217.
page 376 note 1 F. R. Leavis, ‘Tragedy and the Medium?’The Common Pursuit, London, 1966, p. 129.
page 376 note 2 Nietzsche, p. 93.
page 377 note 1 Nietzsche, p. 142.
page 377 note 2 Stein, p. 219.
page 377 note 3 D. H. Lawrence, Phoenix II, London, 1968, note to ‘The Crown’, p. 364.
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