ABSTRACT
This entry focuses on two of the master genres of narrative – tragedy and comedy – and will also offer thoughts about the other two master genres, romance and irony/satire. By “master genre,” I mean the most basic templates adopted and modified in the production of a variety of narratives, whether literary, filmic, dramatic, operatic, or other. Let me start with key points. Tragedy has held an extraordinarily privileged position among the master genres, not just in Western literary culture, but also in both analytic and continental philosophy. For example, Walter Kaufmann's Tragedy and Philosophy traces the connections between these two discourses from the ancient Greeks to the twentieth century, focusing admirably on key dramas in the tradition (Kaufmann 1992). It is noteworthy, but perhaps unsurprising, that philosophy does not have a companion volume titled Comedy and Philosophy. That said, there is a tension when discussing tragedy and comedy (and indeed romance and irony/satire) between treating them as literary modes having identifiable forms and conventional features and treating them as world views. This is the distinction between tragedy as a narrative form of the sort originally described by Aristotle, and modified over the centuries, and as a way of thinking about an author's or filmmaker's artistic vision. Another problem is that while there are twentieth- and twenty-first-century artistic examples of romance, irony/satire, and comedy, it is not entirely clear that there are many examples of tragedy. Even the usual suspects – for example, Death of a Salesman – bring the basic principles of what constitutes recent tragic drama into conflict with the Greek and Elizabethan tragedies that count as canonical. Of course, as Kaufmann notes, it is odd that some think tragedy should still be written in the style of Shakespeare when no one worries that music is no longer written in the style of Palestrina (Kaufmann 1992: 320). Willy Loman might be the antithesis of Oedipus. Nevertheless, like Oedipus Rex, at the core of Death of a Salesman is Loman's discovery of what he truly is (Kaufmann 1992: 322).
