William R. Brashear deals with tragedy, not as a dramatic literary genre, but as a basic way of experiencing the universe and of reacting to it. The writer of tragedy forces readers to confront much more than a tragic flaw in a single character; he forces them to confront the gorgon's head itself, the ultimate chaos of the universe.

For him, Aristotle's intellectualization of tragedy distorted it for centuries because the tragic sense of life is experiential and intuitive rather than logical and syllogistic. In the later works of Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and Spangler, Brashear finds the...