Tragic Play Irony and Theater from Sophocles to Beckett [Hardcover]

Christoph Menke is professor of philosophy at the University of Frankfurt am Main. His publications in English include The Sovereignty of Art, Aesthetic Negativity in Adorno and Derrida, and Reflections of Equality.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 Müller, 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."Christoph Menke develops tragedy as a modern mode of understanding in new and interesting ways. His ideas should generate quite a bit of debate not only in philosophy but also in literary studies and social theory."Prefatory Note
Part I. The Excess of Judgment: A Reading of Oedipus Tyrannus
1. "It was I myself": The Shape of Destiny
Acting, by Knowing
"In the Manner of Tragedy"
2. From Judging to Being Judged: The Story of Oedipus
The Juridification of the Oracle
Placing a Curse
Self-Condemnation
The "Curse of the Law"
3. Author and Character: Oedipus's Existence
Dramatic Existence
Translt