Tragic aesthetics: eighteenth-century tragedy and passive spectatorship. Issue 7 (10th November 2017)

• Record Type: Journal Article
• Authors: Tierney-Hynes, Rebecca
• Is Part Of: Textual practice. Volume 31:Issue 7(2017)
• Page Start: 1217
• Page End: 1235
• Publication Date: 2017-11-10
• Subjects: Eighteenth century -- tragedy -- spectatorship -- passions -- passivity -- emotion -- aesthetics; Literature, Modern -- 20th century -- History and criticism -- Periodicals; Criticism -- Periodicals; Criticism, Textual -- Periodicals; Semiotics -- Periodicals; 801.95
• DOI: 10.1080/0950236X.2016.1237999
• Languages: English
• ISSNs: 0950-236X

Abstract

ABSTRACT: This paper pursues the central thesis that the construction of the eighteenth-century spectator of tragedy as passive opens the self to a radical experience of otherness and a compassionate relationship to the public sphere. The paper examines two related arguments: first, that eighteenth-century tragedy and aesthetic autonomy are related, and that the persistent dismissal of eighteenth-century tragedy as effete and its audiences as complacently bourgeois might be overturned by another look at Adorno's ambivalent definition of aesthetic autonomy; second, that the tragedy of the early eighteenth century develops a special relationship to passivity, both onstage and in its characterisation of its own spectators, and that this passivity is understood to be a comment on tragic form. I conclude that passivity has a specific contemplative moral value in the early eighteenth century, and that its value is incorporated into ethical concepts of aesthetic apprehension.