La muerte de la tragedia

by George Steiner

La verdadera tragedia sume al hombre en el abismo. El universo trágico no se manifiesta en las catástrofes de Job ni en los dramas de Victor Hugo; no habita tampoco en el primer Fausto, de Goethe. Para existir, la tragedia necesita de la imposibilidad absoluta de justicia, redención, diálogo o misericordia; en el mundo de lo trágico, el hombre es un huésped inoportuno, un ser expulsado.

A pesar de la frecuencia con que se habla de la tragedia, la esencia poética que la conforma solo ha brillado ocasionalmente en la literatura. Con esta premisa, Steiner hace una revaloración de la tradición dramática occidental, desde Shakespeare hasta Beckett, en busca de los factores que desviaron por primera vez la flecha de la fatalidad trágica y de las razones por las que el acero de su punta alcanzó solo a algunas de las grandes obras dramáticas de la modernidad.

Genres: Nonfiction, Philosophy, Criticism, Literary Criticism, Literature, Tragedy, History

288 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1961

About the author

George Steiner was a French and American literary critic, essayist, philosopher, novelist, and educator whose work explored the relationship between language, literature, and society, with a particular focus on the moral and cultural consequences of the Holocaust. Multilingual from an early age, Steiner grew up speaking German, English, and French, and studied the classics under his father, while overcoming a physical handicap with his mother’s encouragement. His family relocated to the United States during World War II, an experience that shaped his lifelong reflections on survival, morality, and human cruelty. He studied literature, mathematics, and physics at the University of Chicago, earned an MA at Harvard, and was a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford. Steiner held academic posts across Europe and the United States, including Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of Geneva, Fellow at Churchill College, Cambridge, the first Lord Weidenfeld Professor of Comparative European Literature at Oxford, and Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard, teaching in multiple languages. A prolific writer, he produced influential works in criticism, translation studies, and fiction, including Tolstoy or Dostoevsky, The Death of Tragedy, After Babel, and The Portage to San Cristobal of A.H., blending historical insight with philosophical reflection. His essays and books explored the power and ambivalence of human language, the ethical responsibilities of literature, and the persistence of anti-Semitism, while his fiction offered imaginative examinations of moral and historical dilemmas. Steiner was celebrated for his intellectual breadth and lecturing style, described as prophetic, charismatic, and sometimes doom-laden, and he contributed extensively to journals such as The Times Literary Supplement, The Guardian, and The New Yorker. He was married to Zara Steiner, with whom he had two children, David and Deborah, both of whom pursued academic and public service careers. Steiner’s work remains widely respected for its integration of rigorous scholarship, ethical inquiry, and literary sensitivity, marking him as one of the foremost thinkers in twentieth-century literature and comparative studies.

Reviews

[Jonfaith · Rating 5 out of 5]

And it may well be the untranslatable poet who strikes nearest the genius of his own tongue.

Steiner gives us a vast feat of erudition , he dazzles us with a sinuous thesis and then leaves us with a reading list. Manfred, Boris Godunov, and Wallenstein are just of a very few that Steiner paints in dazzling colors in this encyclopedia of dramatic history. The thesis saunters about a definition of tragedy and the depiction of some relations between the Fates and mortal hubris. He begins with the twin origins of the dramatic tragedy: the Greeks and their creation of the tragic arc and then the Elizabethans and Racine and their interpretation thereof. Steiner then charts the subsequent history of drama and why it failed to match these sets of triumph. Well, until Ibsen and Chekhov decided such no longer reflected the common plight, the shared condition. It is interesting that Steiner withholds judgement on Beckett, hesitating to deign old Sam with his due greatness. This was a delightful experience. The sections devoted to Wagner and Marx were especially captivating.

[Bryn Hammond · Rating 5 out of 5]

(2016 read)
It’s encyclopedic on tragedy, and perhaps the main profit to be had from it is to read about lesser-known playwrights (along with those major names you’ve never got around to), with Steiner’s superb abilities at description. It’s also the best kind of writer’s manual. For instance, if you want to write death scenes, here we have good deaths, bad deaths, meaningful and meaningless deaths, with Steiner’s understanding and again, ability to explicate the artistic effects achieved. I still find it intensely stimulating. He is so saturated in plays that his writing effortlessly turns a phrase worthy of inclusion in them, or issues out in near-verse.

When I twenty-odd he shook my confidence and I believed him when he told me tragedy is defunct to us, what with optimistic religion and optimistic politics; but even without being post both of these, there were always dissenters, not everybody goes along with the main thrust of the culture. I don’t know how he explains to himself the creation of Lear (on which he is fulsome) when Christianity was prevalent. He mentions but doesn’t explore tragedy in the novel; I’d say tragedy has been alive and well in the novel. Lastly, why on earth do we value tragedies if they are alien to us, impossible for us? If we live in an anti-tragic age shouldn’t we toss our Shakespeare and Euripides away?

This time, I also pinned him as a Classicist by temperament, so that he is hard on Romantics and harsh on late Romantics; I don’t think he has the make-up to be fair to them. He was at his most compelling when explaining to me the last Classicists, Racine and Corneille. But his Classicist-Romantic dichotomy began to seem to exaggerated, too. It’s as if you’re in one camp or the other, but I admired the hell out of his Classicists and I’m an arch-Romantic.

I never did a better thing for myself than meet this book, which has been every bit as exhilarating the second time. Even when I don’t believe him.


###
I'll have to read this again before I can review, but he became my God of critics. Even though you might despair when you believe/know that tragedy is the highest art and he proves tragedy impossible in the present age... Meant more to my existential growth than Nietzsche with The Birth of Tragedy.

[Philippe Malzieu · Rating 5 out of 5]

I took advantage of my fixed immobilization forced to reread some books of Steiner. I began with real presences. Death of the tragedy is more ambitious. It is somewhere an history of the literature of the Greek until us. And particularly, he wonders about the disappearance of the tragedy as literary genre. It is for him because of the Christianity, the Marxism and the psychoanalysis. Edip who is the archetype of the tragic hero, toy of the fate, becomes at Freud the hero of a rational quest in search of cure.
Steiner puts texts in perspective. With his great erudition, he allows us to discover this end of the tragedy. The END? Not sure. Is the postmodernity propose to us a kind of new tragedy. There is new mythology. For exemple, when I see the TV series, not only game of thrones. I think in of television series Scandinavians (Swedish and Danish particularly), Israeli, English and some rare French, They are our new tragedies.

[Asclepiade · Rating 5 out of 5]

Questo saggio di George Steiner, scritto nella sua caratteristica prosa nervosa e scattante, s’impernia intorno a una domanda che credo prima o poi ci siamo fatti tutti nel considerare le vicende dei generi letterarî: come mai non si scrivono più tragedie, e come mai quelle scritte negli ultimi secoli serbano un costante sentore di falso e di compromesso? Steiner dà una risposta di fondo semplice, anche se non altrettanto facile da verificare puntualmente, per così dire, in corpore vili: la tragedia è venuta a mancare perché è venuto a mancare il senso tragico della vita; la concezione cioè della vita come giuoco irrazionale, inspiegabile di pedine in mano al destino o a divinità imperscrutabili. Nella nostra cultura il senso tragico del mondo è stato virtualmente cancellato dall’ebraismo: il Dio della Bibbia può essere duro e vendicativo, ma è un Dio razionale: punisce Israele quando si allontana dalla Legge, punisce i nemici del Suo popolo; nell’ebraismo resta quindi sempre viva la fiducia nella giustizia e nella redenzione. Il cristianesimo ha ereditato e sviluppato quest’idea dell’uomo e del suo destino; e ne sono filiazioni, a modo loro, sia pur in prospettiva non più religiosa ma culturale o sociale, anche il romanticismo, il marxismo, la psicoanalisi: tutte fiduciose nella capacità di miglioramento, riscatto e liberazione dell’uomo. Steiner vede benissimo in realtà che la tragedia resta vivissima nella prima età moderna, ossia in un’epoca ovviamente dominata da una Weltanschauung cristiana: ma supera lo scoglio rammentando non solo l’evidente forza d’una tradizione classicistica che dal Rinascimento all’età romantica informò di sé l’intera cultura, ma anche le caratteristiche della società e del potere del tempo, che certamente predisponevano a una visione tragica e non pacificata dell’uomo. Eppure anche in piena età romantica la tragedia seppe agire ancora su autori divisi fra la nuova sensibilità e l’ammirazione sincera per la potenza del teatro attico: Steiner illumina quest’inquieta dialettica con citazioni dai drammi di Byron – pur ormai semidimenticati dai lettori – e dai drammi o dai torsi drammatici di Goethe, di Schiller, di Kleist, di Büchner, di Hölderlin, e anche del nostro Alfieri, che l’autore mostra di conoscere nel testo originale e di tenere in maggiore stima, probabilmente, di tanti lettori italiani. Sulle opere che mostra di conoscere e cita diffusamente, del resto, il Nostro getta spesso sprazzi di luce che ne mettono a fuoco aspetti non sempre evidenti o familiari al lettore: l’erudizione, le vaste letture in almeno quattro lingue, sono esibite però allo scopo d’illuminare, non di sfoggiare o di recar meraviglia. Certo, al lettore più esigente non possono sfuggire zone lasciate in ombra, come il dramma spagnolo del Siglo de oro, evidentemente meno familiare a Steiner anche per il fatto che, credo, egli non conosceva lo spagnolo. Quanto a una certa corrività nel tener conto degli antesignani italiani della tragedia francese di Corneille e Racine, va tenuto conto che da un lato Steiner, correttamente, ne menziona l’esistenza, citando anche la trattatistica di Castelvetro e Scaligero, e dall’altro non gli si può rimproverare di non aver letto l’Orbecche, l’Aristodemo e La Reina di Scotia quando non vi hanno gettato uno sguardo distratto neanche la maggior parte dei nostri professori d’italiano, i quali pure, al contrario di Steiner, avrebbero il dovere di conoscere per completezza e armonia nella formazione culturale anche molti testi su cui poi a scuola, per diverse ragioni, non sarà possibile soffermarsi. Duole, semmai, che fra tanti drammi splendidi, mediocri od orrendi che mostra di conoscere di prima mano, il Nostro con ogni probabilità non abbia letto Il Re Torrismondo: questo sì un vero capolavoro, purtroppo trascurato anche da troppi italiani, sul quale Steiner avrebbe potuto scrivere parole sensibili e penetranti. È questo, ad ogni modo, un testo d’una densità e d’una vastità d’interessi che ne rendono impossibile una considerazione più dettagliata, la quale assumerebbe proporzioni smisurate e richiederebbe d’altronde una preparazione letteraria che al sottoscritto manca; ed è però anche uno di quei saggi ove perfino i dettagli non condivisibili – e non sono pochi – restano interessanti da leggere perché stimolano l’intelletto, non essendo mai frutto di superficialità o generalizzazioni banalizzanti, perché vengono sempre da una meditazione acuta e profonda dei testi.

[John Jr. · Rating 5 out of 5]

George Steiner here surveys tragic drama and what could be called the tragic spirit from Greek tragic drama of the fifth century B.C. to the 20th century. That's his subject. Broadly speaking, his purposes are three: to show in what view of life the tragic spirit has been grounded; to illuminate that view through detailed appreciations of dramatists as varied as Sophocles, Shakespeare, Racine, Ibsen (rather briefly), and a number of others; and then to argue that, with the fading of that view of life under the progress of modern rationalism, the tragic spirit, and hence true tragedy itself, has become impossible. That we have, in Steiner's view, no full-fledged tragedies anymore is not a matter of individual writers, then: it's not because no one happens to have come along in the Western world lately who can produce a good tragedy. It's a matter of the changing ethos of succeeding ages. To borrow a simplification from Steiner's foreword, the tragic spirit possesses "the image of man as unwanted in life, as one whom the 'gods kill for their sport as wanton boys do flies.'" Where it does not prevail, tragedy cannot thrive.

A good illustration not discussed by Steiner, which is (as I write) apropos in New York because of a current production, is Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman. Miller's salesman clings to deluded views of his sons and, to put it crudely, is sorely disappointed in himself. But it's not the universe that has brought him low; he is, to speak crudely again, simply not a very good salesman or a very good father. We can conceive of reasons for his failures; they are all in some sense susceptible to amelioration--we can imagine how, with some social, political, or psychological adjustments, he might've done better. That's the spirit of rationalism that Steiner discusses in this book, and it's fatal to tragedy as the form was understood for centuries. Miller himself believed he had written a tragedy, but the case he made for that view (available in the edition reviewed here) is, in the light of this study by Steiner, unconvincing.

The majority of the text was written in the 1950s and first published in 1961. Beyond prepending a foreword written in 1979 for another edition, Steiner has made no attempt to revise or extend his study. It's possible that some more recent dramatists such as Howard Barker would alter the story, and that the flickers of fatalism one can nowadays detect here and there represent some sort of cyclical return to the spirit of the Greeks. (The rise of superhero tales, which so far have been mostly subliterary, may likewise represent a cyclical return to the mythic mode; Northrop Frye suggested a similar idea in the first essay of his Anatomy of Criticism.) Contemporary theorists, such as George Hunka, are far better equipped than I am to attempt an answer. And other views of many modern dramatists are certainly possible, such as those in The Theatre of Revolt: An Approach to Modern Drama. But none of that affects the power or the beauty of this book.

An unnecessary postscript: The Death of Tragedy originated in Steiner's doctoral dissertation at Balliol College, Oxford, where it was not at first accepted. A Paris Review interviewer, indirectly quoting Steiner, reported that it was rejected "because it was too close to a field that Oxford did not teach in those days: comparative literature." He was later appointed to a chair in that very field at Oxford, the first at either of the Oxbridge universities. Those two facts together will provide some idea of the range of Steiner's knowledge and abilities.

[Niels · Rating 4 out of 5]

I'm neither knowledgeable nor smart enough to fully appreciate this book, but it's delightfully well-written. This quote about Büchner's Woyzeck is illustrative of Steiner's style throughout the book:

"The words that would save us remain just beyond our grasp. That is Woyzeck's tragedy, and it was an audacious thought to make a spoken drama of it. It is as if a man had composed a great opera on the theme of deafness."

The book reads a bit like a period piece, but Steiner's main argument that the alleged decline of tragedy is a result of the interplay between societal, political, scientific, philosophical, artistic and technological developments (in particular rationalism and the rise of prose at the expense of verse) is interesting even when it's not wholly compelling. I'm still a bit confused about Steiner's perspective on the interaction between religion and tragic drama though.

[Florence Ridley · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is an absolutely stellar overview of Western tragic tradition. The sheer range of Steiner's knowledge and his raw skill in criticism makes the text a joy to read. It is a little outdated - Steiner's insistence that only the West has ever developed proper tragedy is a little reductive and has been addressed by several works of postcolonial literary criticism since - but on the whole the text's analysis of different literary periods is accurate and interesting. I particularly enjoyed Steiner's take on the Romantic obsession with tragedy and found myself broadly agreeing with him. I'm not entirely convinced by the sensationalism of the title and don't entirely agree that tragedy has "died" but this is a brilliant and compelling read, well-written and argued, and certainly a seminal work in modern literary criticism.

[Kamil Dudar · Rating 2 out of 5]

([...] mój ulubiony krytyk ubolewał, że zmarnowałem tak świetny tytuł na tę właśnie książkę) [...]."
Niestety z tym nienazwanym przez autora w przedmowie krytykiem jestem zmuszony się zgodzić. Cała idea książki – świetna, ale tylko w opisie. Faktycznie, Steiner pokazuje upadek tragedii per se, ale czy po prostu literacka analiza tekstów jest do tego wystarczająca? Moim zdaniem nie. 2*

[Isabel Fontes · Rating 5 out of 5]

George Steiner’s The Death of Tragedy is a demanding yet compelling exploration of one of the West’s defining artistic forms.
Rather than offering a neat chronology, Steiner examines how tragedy emerged, flourished, and, in his view, declined, situating its fate within the broader movements of Western culture.

Drawing on a formidable range of writers — from the ancients through Shakespeare and Racine to Ibsen, Brecht and Beckett — Steiner shows how tragedy is rooted not only in drama but in the moral imagination of a civilisation. His wide reading and erudition are impressive, but what strikes most is his conviction that the health of tragedy is tied to the vitality of language and culture itself. When language becomes hollowed by cliché, propaganda, or distraction, the tragic mode falters.

The book is not without its excesses. Steiner sometimes casts literature in almost solar centrality, at the risk of neglecting the pressures of politics, society and economics.
He can be sweeping, even apocalyptic, in tone. Yet these overstatements are part of the book’s force: they remind us that he takes literature with deadly seriousness, as something bound up with human dignity.

What makes the essay most valuable is not its finality of argument but its challenge to the reader. Steiner urges us towards a form of reading that is active, strenuous, and reciprocal — not passive admiration, but a dialogue with the text that demands effort, memory, and intellectual courage. Whether one agrees with his claim that tragedy is “dead,” one comes away with the sense that its survival depends on how we read and whether we allow ourselves to be changed by what we encounter.

[TJ DeSalvo · Rating 5 out of 5]

Very rarely am I this pleasantly surprised when my expectations are disappointed. Here's what happened: I checked out The Death of Tragedy because I wanted a book that would give me a solid overview of Greek tragedy. Something like, say, Greek Tragedy by HDF Kitto. I got that for the first ten pages. The rest of the book was a sweeping, panoramic exploration through basically the entirety of Western literary history, tracing the resurgences (and, more tellingly, the failures of resurgence) of the Tragic vision.

The title is misleading: Steiner is not claiming tragedy is "dead," but instead that it is a form that emerges but seldomly in literary history. Elizabethan England and the France of Corneille and Racine are his two paragons of the reemergence of Tragedy outside of Greece. More common are the failures, the near misses, and the transformations of the Tragic vision into something that isn't really Tragedy- most amusing are his chapters on the English Romantics (apparently adapted from his dissertation), Goethe and Schiller. We haven't lived in an age conducive to tragedy for some time, but that doesn't suggest tragedy is dead - it has reemerged in the past, and nothing is stopping it from happening again.

My complaints are few. I feel Steiner's definition of Tragedy to be a bit too limiting. "Tragedies end badly," he states in the book's opening pages - except not all of them do. Many tragedies don't end so catastrophically, though their characters may have had to travel through hell to get there. The Oresteia is the obvious example, but one can also throw out Alcestis, Philoctetes, and Ajax in that group - there is also evidence that Aeschylus' Prometheus trilogy, though we have only the first part, also ends positively. Steiner seems to have corrected himself in his later work - in books like No Passion Spent: Essays 1978-1995 he calls the kind of plays he's talking about here "Absolute Tragedy" to differentiate them from all others. I would've maybe also liked him to devote a bit more time to Roman Tragedy (or Seneca, seeing as that's all that survives). But these are minor complaints, and ones that don't take away anything from how I feel about the final product.

If you're interested in literary history or Tragedy in general, this is a must-read. Steiner has a reputation for being difficult, but his difficulty is of a categorically different order than, say, Derrida or Foucault. He's not an obscurantist - if he's difficult, it's only because he seems to have the entire Western literary/philosophical canon committed to memory, and he expects you to keep up.

[Toney Bedell · Rating 3 out of 5]

"Modern man seeks to explain away suffering, to rationalize and mitigate it. The tragic sensibility, however, accepts suffering as intrinsic and irredeemable."

In The Death of Tragedy, George Steiner does not merely offer a scholarly analysis of tragic literature; he composes a requiem for an entire mode of human expression, and in so doing, crafts a meditation on the nature of civilization itself. His thesis, at its core, is that tragedy—true tragedy, the kind that grips the soul with a sense of unalterable doom—has ceased to be possible in the modern age. With a breadth of erudition that ranges from Aeschylus to Beckett, from Shakespeare to Racine, Steiner charts the evolution of tragedy and, ultimately, its demise. It is a book that demands to be wrestled with, one that insists on the reader’s intellectual engagement and refuses the simple comforts of resolution.

Steiner’s argument is deceptively simple but, like the best of tragic literature, contains multitudes. His assertion is that tragedy, as it was conceived by the Greeks and perfected in the Renaissance, is fundamentally incompatible with the spirit of modernity. This is not simply because the structures of belief that underpinned tragic art—fate, divine justice, cosmic retribution—have collapsed in the wake of Enlightenment rationality, though that is part of it. Rather, Steiner argues that modern man, in his quest for mastery over nature and self, has forfeited the capacity to confront the tragic sensibility that defined ancient and early modern consciousness.

It is in this loss of metaphysical depth that Steiner locates the "death" of tragedy. The Greeks, he argues, understood that tragedy was not merely the result of individual flaws or societal injustice but an inevitable clash between human will and an indifferent, often hostile cosmos. Figures like Oedipus, Prometheus, and Agamemnon suffer not because they are morally inferior or because their societies are corrupt but because they are bound by forces—whether the gods, fate, or their own inescapable natures—that they can neither control nor fully comprehend. Theirs is a world where suffering is written into the very fabric of existence, where human striving is, by definition, futile.

This, Steiner posits, is what has been lost. In the modern world, our tragedies are not cosmic but political, not existential but psychological. We look for explanations, for causes that can be identified and rectified—whether in class struggle, in economics, in psychology—believing that suffering, with enough knowledge or the right policies, can be mitigated, perhaps even eliminated. The modern sensibility, imbued with a belief in progress and individual autonomy, cannot reconcile itself to the notion that suffering is purposeless, that it cannot be redeemed or rationalized. For Steiner, this shift marks the fatal rupture between the tragic consciousness of the past and the world we now inhabit.

Yet, Steiner is not content to leave his argument in abstraction. One of the great pleasures of The Death of Tragedy is its insistence on grounding theory in close readings of texts. His analyses of Sophocles, Shakespeare, Corneille, and others are rich, nuanced, and deeply informed by his encyclopedic knowledge of Western literature and philosophy. Steiner moves effortlessly between the linguistic and the metaphysical, the historical and the aesthetic, drawing connections that illuminate not just the texts in question but the broader cultural shifts they reflect.

In discussing King Lear, for example, Steiner explores the tension between human agency and cosmic indifference, arguing that the play represents a culmination of tragic art because it refuses to offer even the cold comfort of divine justice. Lear, like Oedipus, suffers because he is human, because the universe is such that suffering is inevitable. Yet unlike Oedipus, Lear’s suffering has no higher purpose, no final resolution. It is, in the purest sense, gratuitous—a reflection of the ultimate meaninglessness of human striving in a world without gods or fate to anchor it.

By contrast, Steiner is far less charitable in his treatment of modern dramatists. He sees in figures like Ibsen, Shaw, and Brecht a domestication of the tragic, a reduction of grand metaphysical dilemmas to mere social or psychological conflicts. For Steiner, these writers, however accomplished, are fundamentally incapable of capturing the tragic spirit because they cannot bring themselves to confront the abyss—the radical unknowability of the forces that shape human existence. Instead, they seek to explain, to diagnose, to offer solutions. But tragedy, Steiner insists, is not about solutions; it is about the irreconcilable. It is about the recognition that some aspects of existence cannot be mastered, cannot be made whole, and must be borne.

This is not to say that Steiner dismisses modern drama entirely. On the contrary, he is deeply engaged with the work of twentieth-century playwrights, particularly those of the absurdist tradition, like Samuel Beckett. For Steiner, Beckett represents the closest modern approximation to true tragedy, precisely because he strips human existence of its illusions and confronts the audience with the stark reality of nothingness. Waiting for Godot, in its bleak circularity, captures the essence of tragedy in a world where the gods are silent and history offers no redemption. Beckett, Steiner argues, understands what so many of his contemporaries do not: that the human condition is, at its core, tragic not because we lack solutions but because the universe itself is indifferent to our striving.

At the heart of Steiner’s critique is a profound lament for the loss of the tragic sensibility, which he views as not merely an artistic or literary concern but a philosophical and existential one. The death of tragedy, for Steiner, is synonymous with the death of a certain understanding of what it means to be human. To live in a tragic world is to acknowledge that suffering is not merely accidental or avoidable but woven into the fabric of existence. It is to recognize that human greatness is defined not by mastery or triumph but by the capacity to endure, to persist in the face of an unfeeling cosmos.

And so, The Death of Tragedy resonates as both a critical study and a philosophical elegy. Steiner’s erudition is formidable, his prose densely packed with insights that reward careful, repeated reading. But beyond the scholarly apparatus lies a more profound meditation on the fragility of human life and the limits of our ability to understand and control the world around us. In mourning the death of tragedy, Steiner mourns the loss of a way of thinking, a way of being, that recognized the inevitability of suffering and yet, paradoxically, found in that recognition the possibility of human dignity.

For those of us who believe in the power of literature to illuminate the darkest corners of the human condition, Steiner’s The Death of Tragedy stands as a testament to the enduring relevance of the tragic mode. It reminds us that, in a world obsessed with solutions and progress, there remains something deeply valuable in the recognition that some truths cannot be reconciled, that some suffering cannot be explained away. In tragedy’s death, Steiner finds not despair but the possibility of confronting life’s deepest mysteries with a kind of resolute, if sorrowful, grace.

[Tiago Domingues · Rating 5 out of 5]

Colossal knowledge is large and deep in Steiner books or lectures: Here he presents an advanced comprehension of tragedy and drama, with the comparative method that is not at the reach of all scholars. The opera is sustained by multi fields, multilayers, and above all, cultural context. Sometimes with the quintessential attachment to erudite music, the purity views of classicism, the aesthetic of the century that operates in the different authors, and always the idea of beauty in Steiner Philosophy.
He brings a scale of importance and produces the reasons to the aristocracy of Tragedy literature. And uninterruptedly and without delays demonstrate the cabal evidence.

In one of the interviews that he gave some years ago, he said more or less: «We learn by heart the things you love». The giant that writes this book, learned waves of passages by heart. We feel it.
Saying this, and because of that too, the book opens to the widest crowd hard like an Iceberg. - But - First-rate books probably need other books, preludes, deep introduction.
And this almost hermetic function is also explained several times by Steiner in other times.

From the writings of the ancient Greeks to the French revival classicism, passing by the Spanish Golden Age, the early Italian Renaissance, the Elizabethian, or Jacobite canon. Or to German masters and the Russian greatest, - and also - to the differences of the authors of that canons presented, George Steiner, comes like the Golden Palatine of western culture.

[Mark Valentine · Rating 5 out of 5]

Steiner packs more information in a parenthetical than most can put in a chapter. His range and scope for this topic astound me. I can see why he was called the pioneer of Comparative Literature studies. Within the scope of his essay (354 pages of an essay), he writes with ease about Sophocles, Euripedes, Dante, Marlowe, Shakespeare, Johnson, Dryden, Milton, Montaigne, Racine, Claudel, Kleist, Schiller, Wagner, Keats, Wordsworth, Byron, Hugo, Flaubert, Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, Ibsen, Chekhov, Brecht, Buchner, Pushkin, Strindberg, Eliot, O'Neil, and Beckett. With ease and fluency.

In many ways, it is a eulogy over the Classical understanding of Tragedy as defined by Aristotle. Amazingly, Elizabethan theater revived the Tragedy but that was the pinnacle for audiences and playwrights alike. Ever since the doom (rise?) of Science, rationalism, and damn Voltaire, reason has dethroned the gods and their cosmos for an empirical world and humans have lost their humanist touch for the alien, isolationism of an atomic world.

I have the utmost respect for Steiner. It is an amazing book and serves as a foundation, a textbook, and an exhibit of great scholarship. If there is a gap, it lies in his lack of presenting any kind of solution or point out a direction of escape.

[Anthony Valenti · Rating 5 out of 5]

Just finished my first read. How could any one person be so intimately knowledgeable of so broad a field? I wonder, is there anybody around today who's read--and grasped-- as much literature as Steiner had?
A great stylist, too. Haven't read most of the works discussed, but his insights and elegance made me want to.
But to my point: I'm left with the feeling that I got more about why tragedies--great ones, 'true' ones- aren't being written and less about what tragedy is and why it's considered to be so great. What's to be got out of reading tragic literature if not the slightest glimmer of hope can be found in it?
I love Oedipus and Lear, etc., but maybe I'm a glutton for punishment.
I was hoping fir clearer definition of tragedy as well as Steiner's 'take' on the experience (?) it provides. Maybe I missed it. Another read-through is definitely in order for me.
But wow! A great read and one hell of a scholar.

[Adrik · Rating 5 out of 5]

A classic and a must.

[Rob · Rating 5 out of 5]

Read this in a mad panic for an essay, actually a kick ass polemic. So many critics could learn so much from George Steiner, what a champ.

[judit · Rating 5 out of 5]

steiner és literalment l'home amb el cap més gros del món❤️

[David · Rating 5 out of 5]

¡Otra obra maestra del gran Steiner!

[Michael · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is arrant nonsense of the most delicious kind. Steiner can hardly be offended by such a comment, since he admits in the book's closing pages that "literary criticism has about it neither rigour nor proof. Where it is honest, it is passionate, private experience seeking to persuade." This book certainly meets his own criterion for great literary criticism. Steiner believes that of all forms of literary art, tragedy is "the noblest yet wrought by the mind." His passion for the great tragedians of Greece and Renaissance Europe is intoxicating. Some might find his style flowery, but I find it direct and moving, in a way that is extremely rare in academic prose.

There are two main problems with the book.

Firstly, Steiner is contemptuous of the theatre. For him, tragedy is poetry. All the focus must be on the imaginary characters and their words. He describes stage business, plotting and spectacle as the "superfluous elements" of drama. When he praises a play like Maria Stuart, whose plotting and stage business are brilliant and suspenseful, he simply ignores these aspects and talks about the poetry. This flaw is forgivable in a literary critic, of course. Steiner does not present himself as a man of the theatre. But it does lead him to judge the Romantic playwrights and Wagner very harshly, and I think wrongheadedly.

The second problem is the narrow canon on which he relies to prove his arguments. Perhaps because of this contempt for the theatre, and his traditional literary training, Steiner never discusses any playwrights but the few dead white males who form the pinnacle of the traditional canon. There is nothing wrong with focussing on these playwrights in itself, but his narrow evidence base makes his big claims about the history of drama difficult to accept. He also has a strong bias towards poets. He treats Dryden as the only dramatist of note during the Restoration, for example, and never really deals even with Otway. He writes about the Romantic stage in England using only Byron as an example, without even mentioning the tragedies of Lewis, Maturin and Baillie, which were successful on the stage, and in Baillie's case, on the page as well. His account of twentieth-century drama simply ignores the great English-language playwrights altogether! His notion that somehow Yeats and Eliot were the essential playwrights of their time, and not for example Eugene O'Neil, is surely bonkers. His poor grasp of theatre history is a terrible flaw because it undermines his overall argument that tragedy is dying on the stage. He simply does not present enough evidence of what was on the stage to make this argument work.

But these flaws can't rob a star from the book, because it is really not a book about the theatre at all. If you ignore Steiner's misjudged remarks about the stage, you find here a book about poetry, which teaches us why poetry might matter, which presents a vision of spiritual life and presents an ideal for us to aspire to. At the end of the book, Steiner claims that the three powerful mythologies of Western culture are the Greek, the Christian and the Marxist. He neglected to add his own mythology, the mythology of Liberalism with really underpins his whole outlook. This mythology claims that in the empty modern world, people are free to create themselves. It was the mythology of his favourite modern playwrights, Schiller and Goethe, and as Schiller's incomparable Maria Stuart shows, it was perfectly compatible with tragedy. Steiner, despite giving this book a tragic title—The Death of Tragedy—is, rather ironically, a closet comedian.

[Antonio · Rating 5 out of 5]

Amo molto questo volume, non facile ma affascinante nel suo comparare letterature di diverse epoche, paesi e l'arte drammatica, l'opera. Dice Steiner: "Non è un dramma, ma un'opera, che attualmente costituisce la più valida promessa di un futuro per la tragedia" - e nomina Berg, Janáček, Schönberg, persino Milhaud. Ma viene in mente quanto osservava all'inizio, cioè che "il destino di Agamennone non sarebbe mutato se le leggi sul divorzio fossero state più indulgenti: la psichiatria sociale non risolve la tragedia di Edipo. Ma rapporti economici più sani o migliori impianti igenici possono risolvere alcune gravi crisi nei drammi di Ibsen". Quindi quei nomi [grandi nomi, intendiamoci] io non ce li vedo. Soprattutto - poichè di formazione (anche) inglese - perché non ci si trova il nome di Britten?

[Elizabeth Adams · Rating 5 out of 5]

Brilliant analysis of how the dramatic literary conception of tragedy has changed and evolved along with human society, from the Hebrews to the Greeks, to the Elizabethans and neoclassicists, romantics and modernists. Not only did this book teach me a great deal about plays and traditions in which I'm well-read, it's encouraged me to read plays I have not, from Racine and Corneille to Schiller, Goethe, Pushkin, and their less-known contemporaries. Steiner's prose is accessible and his style very readable, though (inevitably) I found myself more interested in the sections that pertained to plays with which I was already familiar. He quotes passages at length and includes his own translations into English; in some cases I felt he was sacrificing content for poetic meter but he may have a bias in that direction, feeling that the "untranslatability" of certain plays is due to the fact that their music is lost in other languages. For anyone who has read even a few Greek plays, Shakespearean tragedies, and some Ibsen or Chekhov, this book will make fascinating connections and enlarge your sense of the place and concept of tragedy within western human history.

[Daniel · Rating 3 out of 5]

The main argument of this book is that modern perspectives (Romanticism, Christianity, Marxism) are all incapable of genuine tragedy because they have too much hope. While that summary is (I believe) true, it completely ignores the excellent writing and the mind-boggling erudition that runs through this book. The book is a little hard to read if you are not intimately familiar with world literature ranging from the Greeks through modern English, French, German and Russian (not to mention Danish!) drama. It's a book to have the shelf if you're interested in comparative literature, and reading it will spur you to read (and reread) the great works of the Western Canon.

[Julia · Rating 5 out of 5]

a REALLY great smart read for pretentious gays like myself who are sad because there aren't as much plays about grandiose evil women fucking up their own destinies and going down in flames anymore and I'm glad my man George here is backing me up on the academical front of things....

EDIT : Genuinely think this is probably the book that made me want to become a critic.

[Lysergius · Rating 4 out of 5]

I have to confess to a weakness for Steiner's writings. This was astoundingly good. His survey of the drama is comprehensive and insightful. If his conclusion, that tragedy is moribund, is correct then we indeed have a major loss to contend with.

[Joseph Allocca · Rating 4 out of 5]

Tragedy

This book does a great and thought provoking look at the development of tragedy (in the sense of the Greek play). It fails to receive 5 stars only because it lacks a compelling conclusionary statement to tie the whole book together neatly. A very worthwhile read.

[Reuel · Rating 3 out of 5]

literary criticism

[Eric Byrd]

A bargain at $2. Steiner's is my favorite critical prose style after Hugh Kenner's.

[Roos · Rating 4 out of 5]

The love the Writer has for literature and plays is great tot read about.

[Lockomotive]

baru baca sikit dah tertarik sebab cerita tentang kematian...macam best jek...

[Aaron · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very interesting, even though it has nothing to do with my research. A piece of literary criticism that approaches literature itself.