Abstract

This dissertation challenges the presumption of the death of tragedy from a philosophical perspective and illustrates the survival of the genre in contemporary forms of tragedy. ;Beginning with an analysis of Aristotle's Poetics, the argument traces the influence exerted by the Aristotelian tenets of tragedy. While I demonstrate the manner in which the history of tragedy in the West has emerged in light of this foundational treatise, I situate the importance of the inception of a post-Cartesian subject that became key to both philosophical reflections on human subjectivity and considerations about the possibility of representing tragic subjects in drama. This intertwining of philosophy and artistic representation is particularly pronounced in German Idealist thought that developed a philosophy of tragedy and established the subject as the essence of the genre. Critiques of Idealism inevitably led to the claim of the genre's death. ;These developments in the history of tragedy and conceptions of human subjectivity are pinpointed through a critical analysis of Hegel's idealist conceptualizations of tragedy, followed by examinations of new visions introduced by Hebbel, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Lukacs that culminated in Modernist eradications of the subject, best demonstrated in Beckett's plays. ;Despite the institutionalization of the subject's disappearance in poststructuralist hypotheses, theoreticians like Levinas and Zima found a new basis for the self-constitution of the subject. I show how Levinas's ethical and Zima's dialogical theories lay the groundwork for a post-deconstructive subject that can be found in contemporary tragedies whose central conflicts are at once unavoidable and irresolvable. ;For a demonstration of my argument I turn to four contemporary tragedies, representing different national literatures and tragic traditions: Bernard-Marie Koltes's Roberto Zucco , Sharon Pollock's Doc , David Greig's Europe , Tony Kushner's Angels in America . The analysis of these plays focuses on the level of subjectivity their characters attain. The characters are read in light of the different philosophical formulations of the subject discussed in the theoretical part of the dissertation. Both the theoretical and the literary analyses prove that tragedy exists in contemporary dramatic works