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In reading Richard Kuhns's Tragedy: Contradiction and Repression, we have the instructive and delightful experience of being with its author, a professor of philosophy at Columbia University, an expert in aesthetics, a highly
informed student of psychoanalysis, and a specialist in literature. Within the latter role he shows us his sensitivity to the original Greek, Elizabethan English, and German in the works he examines. One could say that Tragedy is the fitting culmination of Kuhns's own trilogy, which began with books on Aeschylus's trilogy and then the comprehensive Psychoanalytic Theory of Art: A Philosophy of Art on Developmental Principles. Meanwhile, escorting us through philosophical and literary works past and present, Kuhns writes engagingly in a warm, associative, and occasionally poetic style. On the way, he makes us forget his personal revelation that he was formally trained in the aridities of positivistic philosophy.
While focusing on the changes in the tragic from its classical dramatic form to its later literary manifestations, Kuhns brings philosophical and psychoanalytic interpretive strategies to bear on the triad of politicalhistorical, psychosexual, and unconscious motifs. Again and again, our author shows that the tragic, being quintessentially human, is continuous from ancient times to postmodernity. Yet, that continuity is of a latent rather than manifest nature: The loss and pain of mourning that typify ancient tragedy have been obscured by contradiction and repression that characterize literary treatments starting from the optimistic Enlightenment and continuing into the New World. The textual scope of Kuhns's concentrated analyses is wide: Aeschylus's Persians, Sophocles' Oedipus Rex, Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice, Kant's Critique of Judgment, Austen's Sense and Sensibility, Kleist's Michael Kohlhass, Melville's The Confidence Man, Whitman's The Leaves of Grass, and three of Emily Dickinson's poems. As if that were not enough, th