ABSTRACT
The word “tragedy” is debased currency nowadays, as likely to be applied to an upset in a sporting competition as to a fatal cataclysm. In a scholarly context, however, “tragedy” connotes a specific literary genre: a drama depicting the human encounter with mortality at its most distressing. Of itself, death is not necessarily cruel; when heroically embraced, it can seem ennobling; when it marks an end to suffering, it can seem a blessing; and when it falls upon the tyrant or the torturer, it can seem cause for celebration. But a tragic death is pointedly and painfully unfair. The sine qua non of literary tragedy is the murder of an innocent. Frequently, the victims are children, or young women in their reproductive prime—emblems of life’s promise and potential. More than occasions for ordinary grief and mourning, such deaths challenge our mutually implicated systems of value: legal, ethical, aesthetic, and religious. At its most corrosive, the tragic vision can make even our highest feelings—our hopes and dreams for the people we love—seem like misguided acts of delusional over-investment in an all-too-fragile substance. Tragedy exposes our limits, including the limits of language; reflections upon the inadequacy of words in the face of a genuine enormity are a commonplace of the genre.
