Tragedy and the Proper Name
March 18, 2016
So much of the way I think about tragedy as a genre and political category comes from the work of Raymond Williams’s Modern Tragedy, in which the critic labors to show how flawed the elitist linguistic divide separating tragedy as a high art (the tragedy of Comparative Literature, English, and Classics curriculums) versus tragedy’s everyday use as signifying a grave event, a calamitous lost.