ABSTRACT
In days of old (the twentieth century), an often-roiled dispute was whether tragedy was still a viable art form. As early as the 1920s, the question whether god was still in the world or whether it was all man’s world now caught the interest Joseph Wood Krutch, who took issue with the status of human beings in face of an absent god and anti-humanistic standards; the dispute continued into the 1940s with Robert Heilman’s demonstration that the word ‘tragedy’ had degenerated into shallow jargon typical of the century, while William Van O’Connor claimed that the times no longer allowed for the ‘restricted Individualism’ that sponsors tragedy. 1
