Synopses & Reviews
Christoph Menke reframes tragedy and the experience it articulates as tragic irony: action that, in being interested in its own success, brings about, by necessity, its own failure and the misfortune, or destruction, of the agent. Through a close reading of King Oedipus, Menke illuminates the tragic fate of normative judgment. He offers a penetrating discussion of the tragedy of play, his answer to the claims of modern theory, which hold that modernity's self-confidence and rational subjectivity eliminate the force of tragic irony. Highlighting modern tragedy's focus on the relationship between tragic irony and theatrical performance, Menke traces this phenomenon through theoretical discourse on tragedy, from Romanticism to Nietzsche and Brecht. Menke then explores the interweaving of tragic irony and theatrical play in unique readings of tragedies ranging from Shakespeare's Hamlet, a paradigm of the tragedy of play, to Beckett's Endgame and beyond.
Synopsis
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.