Modern European Tragedy

Annamaria Cascetta

Description

‘Modern European Tragedy’ examines the consciousness of Europe in the twentieth century through the art of theatre, drawing a vivid picture of how one of the most violent periods of human history dealt with the fundamental structure of the tragic.

The idea of the tragic has permeated Western culture for millennia, and has been expressed theatrically since the time of the ancient Greeks. However, it was in the Europe of the twentieth century – one of the most violent periods of human history – that the tragic form significantly developed. ‘Modern European Tragedy’ examines the consciousness of this era, drawing a picture of the development of the tragic through an in-depth analysis of some of the twentieth century’s most outstanding texts.

Introduction: The Tragic, Tragedy and the Idea of the Limit; Chapter 1: Hubris and Guilt: ‘Genganere’ (‘Ghosts’) by Henrik Ibsen; Chapter 2: Eve Becomes Mary: ‘L’Annonce faite à Marie’ (‘The Tidings Brought to Mary’) by Paul Claudel; Chapter 3: The School of Hatred: ‘Mourning Becomes Electra’ by Eugene O’Neill; Chapter 4: The Destiny of Man is Man: ‘Mutter Courage und ihre Kinder’ (‘Mother Courage and her Children’) by Bertolt Brecht; Chapter 5: The Tragic and the Absurd: ‘Caligula’ by Albert Camus; Chapter 6: Dianoetic Laughter in Tragedy: Accepting Finitude: ‘Endgame’ by Samuel Beckett; Chapter 7: The Arrogance of Reason and the ‘Disappearance of the Fireflies’: ‘Pilade’ (‘Pylades’) by Pier Paolo Pasolini; Chapter 8: The Apocalypse of a Civilization: From ‘Akropolis’ to ‘Apocalypsis cum figuris’ by Jerzy Grotowski; A Provisional Epilogue: Between the Experience and the Representation of the Tragic: Towards a Performative Theatre; Appendix: Chronology of Productions; Notes; Index

Sujets

• General officer
• Literary criticism
• General
• European
• Drama

Informations

• Publié par: Anthem Press
• Date de parution: 01 mai 2014
• Nombre de lectures: 2
• EAN13: 9781783081615
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 3 Mo

Extrait

Modern European Tragedy
Anthem Studies in Theatre and Performance
Anthem Studies in Theatre and Performance takes a broad, global

approach to cultural analysis to examine and critique a wide range of performative

acts from the most traditional forms of theatre studies (music, theatre and dance) to

more popular, less structured forms of cultural performance. The twenty-frst century

in particular has seen theatre and performance studies become a major perspective for

examining, understanding and critiquing contemporary culture and its historical roots.

Performance is a vital manifestation of culture that is enacted, a form to

be experienced, recorded, analysed and theorized. It is among the most

useful and dynamic foci for the global study of culture.

Series Editor
S. E. Gontarski – Florida State University, USA
Editorial Board
Alan Ackerman – University of Toronto, Canada

Robson Corrêa de Camargo – Universidade Federal de Goiás, Brazil

Stephen A. Di Benedetto – University of Miami, USA

Herbert Blau – University of Washington, USA

Enoch Brater – University of Michigan, USA

Annamaria Cascetta – Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore, Milan, Italy

Christopher Innes – York University, Canada

Anna McMullan – University of Reading, UK

Martin Puchner – Harvard University, USA

Kris Salata – Florida State University
W. B. Worthen – Barnard College, Columbia University, USA
Modern European Tragedy

Exploring Crucial Plays
AnnAMARIA CASCETTA Anthem Press

An imprint of Wimbledon Publishing Company

www.anthempress.com
This edition frst published in UK and USA 2015

by AnTHEM PRESS

75–76 Blackfriars Road, London SE1 8HA, UK

or PO Box 9779, London SW19 7ZG, UK

and

244 Madison Ave #116, new York, nY 10016, USA

First published in hardback by Anthem Press in 2014

Copyright © 2015 Annamaria Cascetta

The author asserts the moral right to be identifed as the author of this work.

All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above,

no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or introduced into

a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means

(electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise),

without the prior written permission of both the copyright

owner and the above publisher of this book.

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
The Library of Congress has cataloged the hardcover edition as follows:

Cascetta, Annamaria, author.

Modern European tragedy : exploring crucial plays / Annamaria Cascetta. pages cm. –

(Anthem Studies in Theatre and Performance)

Includes index.

ISBn 978-1-78308-153-0 (hardcover : alk. paper)

1. European drama (Tragedy)–History and criticism. 2. European drama–20th century–History

and criticism. 3. Tragedy–History and criticism. I. Title.

Pn1892.C36 2014

809.2’512–dc23

2014007426

9781783084241

ISBn-13: 978 1 78308 424 1 (Pbk)

ISBn-10: 1 78308 424 3 (Pbk)

Cover image: Franco Citti (Oedipus blind), frame from the flm Oedipus Rex (Edipo re) by

Pier Paolo Pasolini, Italy, 1967 (© Reporters Associati, Rome).

This title is also available as an ebook.
For Gigi COnTEnTS

Acknowledgements ix
Introduction The Tragic, Tragedy and the Idea of the Limit 1
Chapter 1 Hubris and Guilt: Gengangere (Ghosts) by Henrik Ibsen 15
Chapter 2 Eve Becomes Mary: L’annonce faite à Marie
(The Tidings Brought to Mary) by Paul Claudel 31
Chapter 3 The School of Hatred: Mourning Becomes
Electra by Eugene O’neill 47
Chapter 4 The Destiny of Man Is Man: Mutter Courage
und ihre Kinder (Mother Courage and Her Children)
by Bertolt Brecht 59
Chapter 5 The Tragic and the Absurd: Caligula by Albert Camus 75
Chapter 6 Dianoetic Laughter in Tragedy: Accepting
Finitude: Endgame by Samuel Beckett 91
Chapter 7 The Arrogance of Reason and the ‘Disappearance
of the Firefies’: Pilade (Pylades) by Pier Paolo Pasolini 101
Chapter 8 The Apocalypse of a Civilization: From Akropolis
to Apocalypsis cum fguris by Jerzy Grotowski 117
A Provisional Between the Experience and the Representation
Epilogue of the Tragic: Towards a Performative Theatre 147
Appendix Chronology of Productions 163
Notes 199
Index 233 ACKnOWLEDGEMEnTS
I am most grateful to Stanley E. Gontarski for his support and encouragement during
our many years of collaboration, and give a heartfelt ‘thank you’ to Marsha Gontarski
for making our friendship so special.
I also wish to thank the publisher Laterza for permission to translate Chapters 1–6
and the epilogue of this book, published in Italian in the book La tragedia del Novecento
(2010).
It is with much gratitude that I thank Maria Rita Gaito for her accurate contribution
in compiling the appendix and the illustrations, as well as Giuseppe Gario and Brian
Groves for their technical revision of the text.
I wish to record my thanks to Richard Sadleir, who translated this book from Italian
with competence, dedication, unabated patience and sincere interest. The translation
was made possible thanks to the fnancial contribution of the Catholic University of
Milan.
And, fnally, my fondest appreciation to Giusi Lupi. Introduction

THE TRAGIC, TRAGEDY

AnD THE IDEA OF THE LIMIT

Relevance of the Tragic, Irrelevance of Tragedy
In a famous essay on the tragic in ancient drama as refected in the tragic in modern
drama, Søren Kierkegaard observed that ‘the tragic, after all, is always the tragic’ and
that the idea of the tragic remains essentially the same, as it remains natural for mankind
1 to weep.
The consciousness of the tragic has traversed Western culture for millennia. It is closely
bound up with the intuition of inescapable limits, inseparable from the human condition,
the ambiguity and contradictions of the human and the awareness of suffering. Perhaps
it can be conjectured that awareness of the tragic is a profound permanent structure
of the human, which has its anthropological and cultural development in the West and
was given expression in Greek culture at a particular moment in its history, a phase of
dialectic and transition between a mythical–heroic horizon and a legal–political horizon.
It came to the fore in its representation in the theatre in the great season of tragedy in the
ffth century bc, when the theatre was a major religious, ceremonial, aesthetic, political
and social experience at the centre of community life.
If the sense of the tragic is a permanent structure of human consciousness, tragedy
is a form into which that structure has historically been translated. It was embodied
and expressed in tragic art and the stage, which enabled it to exist. As Péter Szondi
2rightly points out, it is only modernity that, while decreeing the death of tragedy, and
3reconstructing its transformations through the centuries, has developed the tragic as
4 a philosophical idea, while a poetic of tragedy has existed ever since Aristotle. now
modernity, since nietzsche, has fuelled a great debate about tragedy to the point at times
of making it the paradigm for the interpretation of human existence and reality.
I begin with a quote from Kierkegaard because he has given us a convincing
foundational description of the tragic. It can serve the theatre critic as a still-relevant
frame of reference for the formulation of a theoretical scheme that will be useful in
picking our way through and interpreting the vast phenomenology of twentieth-century
drama related to the category of the tragic.
I believe the key points are as follows. The tragic and tragedy can be distinguished – even
though originally, in Western culture, the tragic frst appeared and found expression in
the historical form of classical Greek tragedy, and in this way the two concepts became
fused. The tragic should be considered a fundamental phenomenon, one of the essential
human experiences, manifested in the always latent possibility of the corresponding 2 MODERn EUROPEAn TRAGEDY
feeling. It cannot be reduced to a simple momentous historical event, nor can it be
confused with a specifc literary and theatrical form. It is always a possible experience.
Here I am not invoking either the pan-tragic vision or ontology, but the existence
of a category offering historical, psychological, ethical and aesthetic valences of the
greatest importance and interpretative fruitfulness. Important studies entitled The
Death of Tragedy or La métamorphose de la tragedie do not substantially contradict this
5 perspective.
6Interesting confrmation comes from Modern Tragedy by Raymond Williams, who takes
trag