ABSTRACT

This chapter explains how tragicomic attunement and intervention, conceived as a resource or a "tool box", can help achieve, or at least episodically approximate, these admittedly challenging lofty goals of self-fashioning. It suggests how tragicomic attunement and intervention can express, affirm, and strengthen our everyday, real-life devotion to, and actualisation of, such critically important valuative attachments as beauty, truth, and goodness, which values are perhaps the most solid basis for artful self-fashioning of the "good life". The tragicomic includes the wide range of emotional permutations between "the polarities of grief and comfort", polarities that constitute important aspects of everyday life, especially when life bears down on us. Most importantly, the tragicomic values staying power, bearing up, and stamina. As Foster notes, tragicomedy "fits both the individual's experience of life's ups and downs and the human community's broader perception of its own existence".