The epoch bookended by 19 bears examining in relation to the question: What is the structure of tragedy in contemporary American culture? There are many possible answers, depending on where you look.
In Caroline, the death of JFK is the national crisis, and racial tensions and the Civil Rights movement the conflicts. Terrorism was designated the dominant threat, and Islam the enemy to freedom and democracy. When Caroline, or Change premiered at the Public Theater in November 2003, America was still reeling in the aftermath of 9/11. The sung-through musical recomposes “a sense of history and of the future” in order to complicate claims to freedom and to question the meanings, limits, and costs of change.
In a similarly Marxist vein and with Brecht’s late plays as his case study, Williams identified the emergence of a new tragic structure: “the recovery of history as a dimension for tragedy.” He writes, “we should try to see what it means to drama when in recovering a sense of history and of the future a writer recovers the means of an action that is both complex and dynamic.” Playwright Tony Kushner, along with composer Jeanine Tesori, have recovered just such a “complex and dynamic” action in Caroline, or Change. Critical moment-the status quo threatens to be preserved.” Catastrophe, in this sense, is a situation in time-a too-lateness that comes again and again. Walter Benjamin revised this term as one of his “basic historical concepts.” For him, catastrophe is the continuing action of failing to recognize history in the present and thus of maintaining conditions of suffering: “Catastrophe-to have missed the opportunity. In the tragic structure defined by Gustav Freytag, catastrophe refers to the section after the scene of total suffering has taken place it is the final turning point in the tragic hero’s journey. We might call it an extended catastrophe. This is not a static contradiction located somewhere back in the past but an ongoing process and conditioning experience. “We are not looking for a new universal meaning of tragedy,” writes Raymond Williams in Modern Tragedy, “we are looking for the structure of tragedy in our own culture.” The structure of tragedy in contemporary American culture is shaped, still, by the constitutional (and ontological) contradiction between promises of freedom and pursuit of happiness on the one hand, and the legacy of slavery and poverty on the other. The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways the point is to change it. – Fred Moten, “Blackness and Nonperformance” We are sent in history, history comes for us. Change is the anticipation, the unanticipated that anticipates us. There is a foresight that is given in and as the unforeseen.
– Tony Kushner, “Production: ‘Caroline, or Change’” It’s a tragedy, I think, in terms of Caroline’s journey. A well-executed twist will have readers flipping back to see what they missed while cheering the strides made by Libenson’s no-longer-invisible heroine.The Journal of American Drama and Theatre Katie rises to her defense, but Emmie eventually learns to speak up for herself, realizing that embarrassment isn’t the end of the world and being social isn’t as impossible as she thought. Emmie and Katie share a crush on classmate Tyler, and when a sappy love note Emmie writes to Tyler as a joke is made public, Emmie is humiliated.
INVISIBLE EMMIE QUOTES MOVIE
Katie’s chapters, by contrast, are big, splashy panels that reflect her outgoing personality (“I’m just your average teenage girl,” she says after being offered movie roles and the crown of homecoming queen). With frizzy hair and hunched shoulders, Emmie shows up in tiny vignettes, sandwiched between blocks of text, that make her look as small and insignificant as she feels. School is stressful for shy, quiet Emmie Katie, meanwhile, is breezily popular, confident, and beautiful. “In her first children’s book, cartoonist Libenson ( The Pajama Diaries) offers strikingly different visions of seventh grade through two very dissimilar narrators. Nice pre-publication review by Publishers Weekly!
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