English 3554E Lecture 5: Zuleika Dobson 4/4

• School: Western University
• Department: English
• Course: English 3554E
• Professor: Allan Pero

Document Summary

We see comedy as a sort of barrier to elegance, understanding, etc But there"s a difference between the tragedy and how the tragic hero takes in the sublime - macbeth, hamlet, king lear. Dying for one"s love can be the stuff of one"s tragedy, embarrassing oneself can be from a comedy, but dying for ones love because two hooting owls tell you to is camp. Camp is an experience of the sublime but viewed from the perspective of the ridiculous. If tragedy is about the fall of a hero, and comedy is about tripping, camp trips but does not fall into the abyss. Camp is a symptom of modernism - it opens up a weird temporal gap between aestheticism and modernism by seeing these failed moments and rendering them the stuff of history. Beerbohm is doing this in the invocation of cleo, his muse.