This ‘View From Here’ more or less marks the end of my time as one of Northumbria’s team of editors for English.1¹ As one of several innovations to enhance the journal’s international profile and reach, we introduced this shorter, more informal format as a way to encourage scholars and teachers from around the world to offer provocative reflections on the state of the discipline where they are, and we are proud to have included contributions from Cyprus, India, the USA, and the Czech Republic, amongst other places. As a scholar and teacher of literature (including a module called Tragedy) in the UK, I had long planned my ‘View From Here’ to be about how the literary language of tragedy is used in contemporary political discourse. I intended to focus in particular on the reporting of and responses to the Grenfell Tower disaster of 14 June 2017, when seventy-two people died in or as a result of a fire in a block of flats in one of the poorest parts of the richest parts of London. Since then, the UK’s most marginalized and most vulnerable communities have endured – and survived – other disasters, from dire austerity and the effects of climate change to the ongoing Covid-19 crisis. Remembering Grenfell remains a focus here, but while writing amidst ‘lockdown’ in Spring 2020, this last event came to dominate my thinking (as it has done many others'). Clearly, to think, now, about Grenfell and what has come after, is to bring into focus what makes such crises and disasters happen, and how we talk about them when they do. The official inquiry into what happened at Grenfell which began in 2017 is ongoing, and now in its second phase, and others have written incisively about phenomena like Covid-19 to explore contemporary discourses, critiques, and realities of crisis.2² Both events, and responses to them, illustrate that, as Raymond Williams’ Modern Tragedy made abundantly clear when first conceived and published in the 1960s, if we think tragedy is just an abstract concept or simply a scholarly concern, we’d be wrong.3³ As this ‘View From Here’ will suggest, Williams’ work stillresonates today in other ways, too: the language of tragedy, and assumptions about how tragedy works and what it means, permeate much of our popular and political discussions about current events, and this is evident in how the media reports these discussions.

中文翻译：

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从这里看–现代悲剧的还原

这种“观从这里或多或少的痕迹我的结束时间为诺桑比亚的编辑团队中的一对英国0.1 ¹作为提高该期刊在国际上的知名度和影响力的几项创新之一，我们引入了这种更简短，更非正式的形式，以鼓励世界各地的学者和教师对他们所在学科的现状进行挑衅性的思考，我们我们很荣幸收到塞浦路斯，印度，美国和捷克共和国等地的捐款。作为英国的学者和文学老师（包括一个名为“悲剧”的模块），我很早就计划了“从这里看”，以探讨悲剧的文学语言如何在当代政治话语中使用。我打算特别着重于2017年6月14日格伦费尔大厦（Grenfell Tower）灾难的报告和应对，伦敦最富有的地区之一最贫穷的地区的一栋公寓楼中有72人死于火灾或因起火而死亡。自那时以来，英国最边缘化和最脆弱的社区经历了其他灾难，并幸免于难，这些灾难包括严峻的紧缩政策和气候变化的影响，以及持续的Covid-19危机。记住格伦费尔仍然是这里的重点，但是在2020年春季“封锁”期间写作时，最后一个事件开始支配了我的想法（因为它做了很多其他事情）。显然，现在想想格林菲尔及其后发生的事情，就是要集中讨论造成此类危机和灾难发生的原因，以及我们在灾难发生时如何谈论它们。正式调查始于2017年的格伦费尔（Grenfell）发生的事情正在进行中，现在已经进入第二阶段，²这两个事件以及对事件的回应都说明，正如雷蒙德·威廉姆斯（Raymond Williams）的《现代悲剧》在1960年代首次构思和出版时就清楚地表明了这一点，如果我们认为悲剧只是一个抽象的概念或仅仅是学术上的关注，那我们就错了.3 ³正如“从这里来看”所暗示的那样，威廉姆斯的著作在今天也仍然以其他方式引起共鸣：悲剧的语言以及对悲剧如何发挥作用及其含义的假设，充斥着我们对当前形势的许多流行和政治讨论。事件，这在媒体如何报道这些讨论中就很明显。