PULS
Foto: Matthias Friel
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Tragedy, usually seen as the grandest genre of the Western theatrical tradition, has a paradoxical status in the present: On the one hand, hardly any tragedies seem to be written by contemporary playwrights in the English-speaking world, while on the other hand, theatre programmes all over Britain, Europe and the US abound with new, often startlingly original productions and re-adaptations of classical tragedies, mostly Greek and Shakespearean. As a dramatic form, it seems, tragedy is thus both dead and alive. Moreover, in the area of critical cultural theory, tragedy has recently resurfaced as a crucial concept to discuss the complexities of the political and the ethical after the evaporation of the post-1989 idea that history had practically come to an end. In this perspective, tragedy appears as a form to make meaning of a present that is marked by deep-running conflicts and challenges, both at the social and individual level of experience.
In this seminar, we will
Please buy:
A very useful collection of recent approaches to tragedy is Rita Felski’s edited volume, Rethinking Tragedy (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 2008).
3 credit points and grade for a session chair and written summary.
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