Un católico en Nueva York: Lorca’s Tragic Vision of the United States

This article discusses the role of Spanish Catholic tradition in the poetry of Federico García Lorca, especially in Poeta en Nueva York. Beginning with key concepts from Miguel de Unamuno’s Tragic Sense of Life to elucidate this tradition of irrationality, suffering, and spiritual vitality, we see that Lorca uses similar ideas as resistance to a “Protestant” modernity that, according to Lorca, favored materialist progress while eschewing human suffering. This article also demonstrates how the use of Spanish religious tradition complicates long-standing stereotypes of Spain’s supposed lack of modernization.

John Ford’s The Long Voyage Home (1940)

This chapter deals with the 1940 film The Long Voyage Home, directed by ‘America’s Homer’, John Ford, and critically received as ‘a modern Odyssey’. The film is an adaptation of four one-act plays by Eugene O’Neill, known as the Glencairn cycle, which are permeated by a tragic vision of unattainable nostos. Set in the contemporary context of World War II, it dramatizes the SS Glencairn’s perilous voyage home from the West Indies to England, with a cargo of munitions aboard. There is no obvious Odyssean figure in this nostos tale. Instead the members of the steamer’s ragtag international crew represent variations of the same Odyssean longing. Joseph McBride defines the film’s dramatic focus as ‘the archetypal Fordian male conflict between the urge to wander and the yearning for home’. But these men are not so much wanderers as lost souls purgatorially in thrall to the sea.

Dylan Thomas’s “Over Sir John’s Hill”: The Motif of His Art Songs

In the last dramatic art song “Over Sir John’s Hill,” Dylan Thomas reiterates that the motif of his art songs has been the Yeatsian introspective process of individuation and integration, transfiguration and transformation, the mortal vision of Grecian altruistic art song as seen in his early poem 18 Poems. His Yeatsian process of tragic happiness, his warm impersonal art, his paradoxical sensibility that makes him an artist of success and popularity in contrast to W.H. Auden’s Eliotian motif of metaphysical process of self-annihilation and immortal art, his aesthetic amoral impersonal art, his tragic vision of art song which deprives him of his grandeur and influence. However, the main thrust is extending to the dismembered and discontented Auden the very same process of regeneration that Thomas has offered to the victims of Auden’s art song while ignoring everything about … allegations of tilting, toppling and conspiracy against him. The song also testifies to his Yeatsian cosmopolitan culture maintaining his equanimity and magnanimity when he confronts an atmosphere of envy and ill-will, and hatred and violence.

A Comparative Study of Zhuangzi and Nietzsche’s Tragic Vision and Aestheticism

This article argues that both Zhuangzi and Nietzsche’s aestheticism is a means of overcoming their tragic vision of life. Nietzsche’s aesthetic state of Dionysian intoxication and Zhuangzi’s floating/wandering (游) involve similar, rapturous self-loss in merging with a primal unity or ground being of existence. Both seek an aestheticised, spiritual freedom that is built on an alienation from their perceived reality. Both versions of aestheticism have their price: the penalty of Zagreus in Dionysus, and the sacrifice of historical time and historical self in Zhuangzi’s thought. Beneath their aestheticised vision of primal unity, both are torn by tragic conflicts and sacrifice. Of Zhuangzi, we could say the same as Nietzsche said of the Greeks in his The Birth of Tragedy: ‘this is the real meaning of the famous Greek serenity, so often misrepresented as some kind of untroubled cheerfulness’.