Sweet Violence: Tragedy and the Postmodern - Einzelansicht

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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

• briefly survey the Western tradition of conceptualising tragedy by discussing excerpts from Aristotle, Milton, Hegel, and Nietzsche;
• read a few examples of contemporary tragedies in the narrow sense of a dramatic genre;
• and focus on a selection of recent discussions of tragedy as a form of meaning-making.

Please buy:

• Sarah Kane: Phaedra’s Love (incl., e.g., in Sarah Kane: Complete Plays. London: Bloomsbury 2001)
• Mike Bartlett, King Charles III (London: Nick Hern Books 2014)
• More material will be made available on Moodle by the beginning of the semester.

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.