From the Museum of Literary Archeology: Is Tragedy a Petrified Fossil or a Living Dinosaur?

Abstract

One of the central views on tragedy as an artistic genre in twentieth century is represented by Steiner’s popular assumption of the death of tragedy. Original and persuasive, it created the impression that the genre and its related human experience were coming to a closure. The last fifty years when post-dramatic practices developed in the performance studies seem to merely confirm Steiner’s hypothesis. Yet, regardless of this, the debate over the tragedy has been going on with a swing. The new millennium proved to be particularly fruitful when some of the most important theorists, such as T. Eagleton, E. Fischer-Lichte, H.-T. Lehmann, and even S. Critchley joined the debate. From their own idiosyncratic points of view—experiential, historical, philosophical, artistic—the results of their conclusions were unequivocal: tragedy continues to exist. In their analyses, presented in this article, they address traditional concepts such as myth and (hi)story, hero and subject, fate and guilt, freedom and necessity, and develop the thesis that tragedy—literally or figuratively—undoubtedly is an attribute of the human condition—since “man proposes, God disposes.” Tragedy, even modern, describes the human condition when human being choses an action of which the outcome he/she does not know. All he/she has is a faith and blind self-confidence.