Tragic Play: Irony and Theater from Sophocles to Beckett (Hardcover) (ISBN-13: 9780231145565)

Tragic Play explores the deep philosophical significance of classic and modern tragedies in order to cast light on the tragic dimensions of contemporary experience. Romanticism, it has often been claimed, brought tragedy to an end, making modernity the age after tragedy. Christoph Menke opposes this modernist prejudice by arguing that tragedy remains alive in the present in the distinctively new form of the playful, ironic, and self-consciously performative. Through close readings of plays by William Shakespeare, Samuel Beckett, Heiner M ller, and Botho Strauss, Menke shows how tragedy re-emerges in modernity as "tragedy of play." In Hamlet, Endgame, Philoktet, and Ithaka, Menke integrates philosophical theory with critical readings to investigate shifting terms of judgment, curse, reversal, misfortune, and violence.

Author: Christoph Menke
ISBN-10: 023114556X
ISBN-13: 9780231145565
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Language: English
Published: 07/07/2009
Pages: 248
Format: Hardcover
Weight: 1.05lbs
Size: 9.10h x 6.00w x 0.90d