LIT 5047 Fall 2019 Gontarski
"Ours is essentially a tragic age, so we refuse to take it tragically." --D. H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley's Lover
“Tragedy is not concerned with human justice. Tragedy is the statement of an expiation, but not the miserable expiation of a codified breach of a local arrangement, organised by the knaves for the fools. The tragic figure represents the expiation of original sin, of the original and eternal sin of him and all his ‘soci malorum,’ the sin of having been born.”—Samuel Beckett. Proust, 49.
‘Pues el delito mayor Del hombre es haber nacido.’ Beckett quoting Pedro Calderón de la Barca, La vida es sueño.
This course focuses on the possibilities of tragedy and the tragic spirit in contemporary culture, in Modernist theater theory and performance studies, and deals in particular with the issues (or possibilities) of tragedy in the modern world dominated by irony, or, what has been called, "tragic play" in Modernity or Modernism, itself sometimes referred to as "the age after tragedy." We will read through Aristotle (The Poetics), Nietzsche (The Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of Music), Antonin Artaud (The Theatre and its Double), Hans-Thies Lehmann (Postdramatic Theatre), and Christoph Menke (Tragic Play: Irony and Theatre from Sophocles to Beckett). Theatrically, we will start with Euripides's The Bacchae, and Iphigenia at Aulis*, move perhaps to Elektra and Shakespeare’s King Lear (why do Greek tragedy and Shakespeare survive in our age, by the way?), and move through Grotowski’s Akropolis** to close readings of modernist or avant-garde playwrights like Williams, Beckett, Pinter, and the work of performance groups (and theorists) like Peter Brook, Jerzy Grotowski, Wlodzimierz Staniewski (of Gardzienice***), André Gregory, Mabou Mines, Complicité and the like.
"There is a clothing brand in the United States named 'Life Is Good', a monstrous lie which is emblazoned on all their products. It is an enormously successful brand, and I'll tell you why: because life isn't good. 'They give birth astride of a grave,' wrote Samuel Beckett, 'the light gleams an instant, then it's night once more.' He was only half-right; he left out the part about there being banana peels on the ground beside the grave, so that from the moment we are born, we slip, and drop our coffee, and everyone points at us and laughs, and then there's a Holocaust, and then, and only then, is it dark once more. Books that cry at the tragedy are easy and, in my view, lazy; [on the other hand, books that I have selected] look into the abyss, smile, and give the abyss the finger. That's much more difficult." Shalom Auslander, Hope: A Tragedy
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2012/feb/29/shalom-auslander-top-10-comic-tragedies
[*“Iphigenia at Aulis” was Euripides’s last play, written just before his death, but it only premiered posthumously as part of a tetralogy that also included his Bacchae at the City Dionysia festival of 405 BCE. The play was directed by Euripides’s son or nephew, Euripides the Younger, who was also a playwright, and won first prize at the contest (ironically a prize that had eluded Euripides all his life). Some analysts are of the opinion that some of the material in the play is inauthentic and that it may have been worked on by multiple authors.]
Requirements: This course satisfies the requirement for coursework in the following Areas of Concentration: Post-1900 Literature and Culture.