Tragic Play: Irony and Theater from Sophocles to Beckett (Columbia Themes in Philosophy Social Criticism and the Arts)

About this book

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 Mller 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.