For me, a large part of Brian Eno's genius is his ability to approach artistic endeavors in a fresh, uncluttered way. Any such re-evaluation necessarily involves laying aside conventional definitions: from this position, new insights can arise, and thus, new and more fitting definitions can evolve and be posited. In his book "A Year With Swollen Appendices : Brian Eno's Diary", Eno offers a refreshing and penetrating definition of drama which greatly impressed me.
"What happens to you when you go to a movie? You sit in a chair, and you watch a world construct itself before you. Then you get a description of some people in that world. You watch the working out of the interactions between the people and the world they're in. What do they do? What would I do? You are watching the collision of implied value systems within a proposed environment. This is called 'drama', and when we see that the value system is doomed to fail disastrously we call it 'tragedy'. When it fails ludicrously we call it 'comedy'. For millennia, fiction and theatre (and now film and TV) have been about this - about the proposal and description of a world and the dynamics of value-laden interactions within it." (1)
I came across the above passage in the course of searching through the diary for something else entirely. I became seriously sidetracked (as I always do when I read this book) and ended up reading his essay entitled "Culture" instead. In one of those happy coincidences that serve as reminders of the unfathomable interconnectedness of everything, I found myself reading a passage that was laterally related to the subject I was originally searching for, but had very different things to say about it. The cool depth of Eno's insights struck me anew, and they will influence the writeup I was originally researching when I finally come to write it. I just had to share the passage with you here first though. I am never one to argue with the non-logic of such events.
(1) "A Year With Swollen Appendices : Brian Eno's Diary" by Brian Eno, Faber and Faber, 1996 : ISBN 0-571-17995-9