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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Tragedy and Redress in Western Literature: A Philosophical Perspective

Tragedy and Redress in Western Literature: A Philosophical Perspective

Gaskin, Richard

Hardcover

Series: Routledge Research in Aesthetics

PhilosophyLiterary Criticism

ISBN10: 1138498084
ISBN13: 9781138498082
Publisher: Routledge
Published: Apr 30 2018
Pages: 412
Weight: 1.62
Height: 0.94 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.00
Language: English

This book offers a unique interpretation of tragic literature in the Western tradition, deploying the method and style of Analytic philosophy. Richard Gaskin argues that tragic literature seeks to offer moral and linguistic redress (compensation) for suffering. Moral redress involves the balancing of a protagonist's suffering with guilt (and vice versa): Gaskin contends that, to a much greater extent than has been recognized by recent critics, traditional tragedy represents suffering as incurred by avoidable and culpable mistakes of a cognitive nature. Moral redress operates in the first instance at the level of the individual agent. Linguistic redress, by contrast, operates at a higher level of generality, namely at the level of the community: its fundamental motor is the sheer expressibility of suffering in words. Against many writers on tragedy, Gaskin argues that language is competent to express pain and suffering, and that tragic literature has that expression as one its principal purposes.

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