"A major contribution to literary and cultural studies—bold, illuminating, and persuasively argued."—Karla Holloway, Duke University

The first evaluation and critique of Hegel's theory of tragedy and comedy, this book also develops an original theory of both genres.

Explains the worldviews of comedy & tragedy, & analyzes world religions, finding some to be more comic, other more tragic.

Russia's funniest and most popular films are the work of Èl'dar Riazanov, a director whose light, lyrical tales of love lost and found have garnered audiences of over one hundred million. Although Western scholars have largely ignored Riazanov's oeuvre in favour of more serious filmmakers, no director in Russia has been so loved by both the public (openly) and politicians (covertly). His early comedies mapped the relations between society and socialism, allowing him to create a radically apolitical art of kindness and kindred spirits. David MacFadyen investigates what made Riazanov's films so wildly popular and what – if any – relationship that popularity had to Soviet policy. Using the works of Deleuze, Lacan, and Kristeva, MacFadyen looks at how Riazanov's films relate to society, audience demand, and Soviet politics. In more than twenty love stories that have precious little to do with statecraft, Soviet or otherwise, Riazanov captures the willful inclusiveness of socialist culture.

This is a study about the reshaping of tragedy and comedy in serious French drama in the quarter century following World War II. It offers an introduction to the most important plays of the period, which include those of Sartre, Arrabal, Beckett, Ionesco, Camus, Montherlant, Adamov and Genet.

Contents: Introduction: New Tragedy and Comedy; The Background: From^R La Machine infernale to Huis clos; More Sartre and Camus: Drama, Tragedy and Philosophy; Henry de Montherlant: Tragedy and Morality; Samuel Beckett: New Tragedy; EugÈne Ionesco: New Comedy; Arthur Adamov: Black Satire, Dreams and Politics; Jean Genet: Tragic Masquerades; Fernando Arrabal: Tragic Farce; Conclusion: The Death of Comody?; Select Bibliography; Index

With The Tragedy and Comedy of Life, Seth Benardete completes his examination of Plato's understanding of the beautiful, the just, and the good. Benardete first treated the beautiful in The Being of the Beautiful (1984), which dealt with the Theaetetus, Sophist, and Statesman; and he treated the just in Socrates Second Sailing (1989), which dealt with the Republic and sought to determine the just in its relation to the beautiful and the good. Benardete focuses in this volume on the good as discussed in the Philebus, which is widely regarded as one of Plato's most complex dialogues. Traditionally, the Philebus is interpreted as affirming the supposedly Platonic doctrine that the good resides in thought and mind rather than in pleasure or the body. Benardete challenges this view, arguing that Socrates vindicates the life of the mind over against the life of pleasure not by separating the two and advocating a strict asceticism, but by mixing pleasure and pain with mind in such a way that the philosophic life emerges as the only possible human life. Socrates accomplishes this by making use of two principles - the limited and the unlimited - and shows that the very possibility of philosophy requires not just the limited but also the unlimited, for the unlimited permeates the entirety of life as well as the endless perplexity of thinking itself. Benardete combines a probing and challenging commentary that subtly mirrors and illumines the complexities of this extraordinarily difficult dialogue with the finest English translation of the Philebus yet available. The result is a work that will be of great value to classicists, philosophers, and political theorists alike.

In this study, Professor Kelly analyzes Dante's understanding of the meanings of tragedy and comedy in his undisputed works, especially the 'De vulgari eloquentia' and the 'Comedia'. He finds that Dante's criteria concerned subject-matter and style, not emotions like happiness and sorrow, or plot movement from one mood to another, or humor or the lack of it. He considered Vergil's 'Aeneid' and his own lyric poems to be tragedies because of their sublime subjects and their use of elevated style and vocabulary. He considered the 'Inferno', along with the 'Purgatorio' and the 'Paradiso', to be a comedy because of the range of subjects and styles. Dante's commentators, in contrast, tended to have a plot-based understanding of these genres, and they attributed similar views to Dante himself. On the basis of both content and style, Kelly concludes that the 'Epistle to Cangrande' is not by Dante, except possibly for the first three paragraphs, and therefore ascribes it to Pseudo-Dante. It was not compiled as we have it until the last quarter of the fourteenth century, but it incorporated an earlier anonymous 'accessus' to the 'Comedia'. This 'accessus' drew heavily on Guido da Pisa's commentary, and it in turn was used by Boccaccio.