The return of tragedy : an ecology of form from Ancient Greece to 1904
Abstract/Contents
- Abstract
- This dissertation examines the ways in which tragedy produces, and challenges, human subjectivity in three distinct periods of western theatrical production. It also tells a story of their ahistorical continuity based on tragic repetition. Readings of Aeschylus' Oresteia, Sophocles' Oedipus Tyrannos, and Euripides' Bacchae ground this argument in the Greek original. Specific constructions of fate, agency and justice provide sites for understanding the evolution of a tragic consciousness. Charting a meta-narrative of tragic inheritance through Greek tragedy, Renaissance tragic drama, and the modern drama, I establish an alternative view of western theatre's past—one that embodies its own consciously adopted tragic form. Renaissance artists repressed the knowledge structures contained in the artifacts of a past consciousness in service of Christian morality and bourgeois rationality. By creating a hybrid moral tragedy rooted in contemporary ways of knowing, they valorized the human perspective in contradiction to the world-centered one that Greek tragedy staged. As a result, the dramatic tradition increasingly excluded that which could not self-disclose from its catalogue of the real. It secured the illusion of autonomous human agency, creating the conditions for its own literary and historical tragic reversal. Marlowe's Doctor Faustus, Shakespeare's Macbeth, Hamlet and Winter's Tale model this contradiction. Finally, I retheorize Szondi's "crisis of the drama" reading Strindberg's Miss Julie, Ibsen's Hedda Gabler and Chekhov's The Cherry Orchard as a final cycle of tragedy that stages historical transformation as the suicide of dramatic realism.
Description
| Type of resource | text |
|---|---|
| Form | electronic; electronic resource; remote |
| Extent | 1 online resource. |
| Publication date | 2014 |
| Issuance | monographic |
| Language | English |
Creators/Contributors
| Associated with | Moore, Matthew |
|---|---|
| Associated with | Stanford University, Department of Theater and Performance Studies. |
| Primary advisor | Rehm, Rush |
| Thesis advisor | Rehm, Rush |
| Thesis advisor | Brooks, Helen, 1949- |
| Thesis advisor | Hill, Leslie |
| Thesis advisor | Rayner, Alice |
| Advisor | Brooks, Helen, 1949- |
| Advisor | Hill, Leslie |
| Advisor | Rayner, Alice |
Subjects
| Genre | Theses |
|---|
Bibliographic information
| Statement of responsibility | Matthew Moore. |
|---|---|
| Note | Submitted to the Department of Theater and Performance Studies. |
| Thesis | Thesis (Ph.D.)--Stanford University, 2014. |
| Location | electronic resource |
Access conditions
- Copyright
- © 2014 by Matthew Robert Moore
- License
- This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial 3.0 Unported license (CC BY-NC).
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