Abstracts

Julien Alliot (Université Paris-Sorbonne)

THE “UNCOMELY COMEDY”: CELEBRATING THE DIVIDED SUBJECT IN CONTEMPORARY BRITISH DRAMA

In traditional British drama, well-wrought comedies by Dryden, Congreve, or later Wilde, were characterised by their light and entertaining manner. Peripeteia and good-hearted laughter usually led to a happy and festive ending (more often than not a wedding). The Second World War proved a significant turning point for comedy, as playwrights were confronted with the ethical question of the very possibility of laughter. Read More

Konrad Bach (Free University Berlin)

LAUGHTER AS A PHENOMENON OF PRESENCE

Murmel Murmel and other plays impressively demonstrate that the pleasure of funny theatre performances cannot be found only in the realm of comic. As Bergson, Freud, Plessner and many other scholars have described, decoding a comic connection of incongruous ideas provides us with a certain delight. This delight is increased the more unusual, sophisticated and at the same time subversive the connection of ideas appears. Read More

James Corby (University of Malta)

OF COMFORT NO MAN SPEAK: TRAGEDY, INDIFFERENCE, CONSOLATION

‘Let us sit upon the ground / And tell sad stories’, says Shakespeare’s Richard II; ‘Sit down, / Discourse to me some dismal tragedy’ says Webster’s Duchess of Malfi; ‘Come, let’s away to prison [...] And take upon’s the mystery of things / As if we were God’s spies’, says Lear to Cordelia; ‘No man at all can be living for ever, and we must be satisfied’, says Maurya at the end of J.M. Synge’s Riders to the Sea, described By D.H. Lawrence as ‘the genuinest bit of dramatic tragedy, English, since Shakespeare’. Read More

Matthias Dreyer (Goethe University Frankfurt/Main)

CAESURA OF TRAGEDY - HISTORICITY AS CRITICAL PROCESS

Taking into account the intertwinements of the theory of tragedy on the one hand and theatrical work on (ancient) tragic texts on the other, the paper explores the way in which the suspension of tragedy as a genre is a part of tragedy itself. This is especially the case in conceptions of tragedy as a rupture or interruption, which, in a certain way, seem to be constitutionally attached to the idea of transition. Read More

Rachel Fensham (University of Melbourne)

ON WATCHING TRAGEDY: BLACK MEDEA AND THE CHORUS

In my 2009 essay ‘on watching tragedy’, I proposed a model for thinking about the generic significance of tragedy as performance. This model comprised four dramaturgical propositions that, in my view, contribute to shaping and informing the reception of late twentieth century theatre production of tragedy. In performance, the corporeal work of the actors builds upon these concepts which are designed to elicit powerful psychological and sociological affects in the spectators, or the audience. Read More

Russell Ford (Elmhurst College)

PANEL DISCUSSION 2: How do comedy and tragedy perform philosophical thought?

In 1967, Deleuze presented a paper to the French Society for Philosophy entitled, “The Method of Dramatization.” Much of the paper would find its way into Difference and Repetition which was published in the following year. Throughout his works, Deleuze has recourse to the language of drama and performance – I’m thinking especially of the discussions of tragedy in Nietzsche and Philosophy, and of comedy in Coldness and Cruelty, both of which are extended in other works. Read More

Rupert Glasgow (Independent Scholar)

COMEDY, PHILOSOPHY, AND THE PARADOX OF EXPECTING THE UNEXPECTED

Like jokes and other forms of social play, comedy creates a doubly paradoxical context in which spectators are induced to call reality into question and expect the unexpected. This is because comedy tends to be implicitly or explicitly structured by the twin paradoxes that ‘this is not real/true’ and that ‘you are now going to be surprised’. Read More

Kélina Gotman (King's College London)

EXCEPTIONALISM, SCHIZOPHRENIA, ARTAUD:ON JUDGMENT

Gilles Deleuze posits that judgment is the crowning principle governing tragedy and modern philosophy at the same time (“Pour en finir avec le jugement,” in Critique et Clinique, 1995). Drawing on Antonin Artaud’s final radio play, Pour en finir avec le jugement de dieu [To Be Done with the Judgment of God], Deleuze argues that Artaud, like D.H. Lawrence, Kafka and Nietzsche, suffered from the judgment of others inasmuch... Read More

Karoline Gritzner (Aberysthwyth University)

TRAGEDY AND THE PERSISTENCE OF SEMBLANCE

Peter Szondi has suggested that in the late eighteenth century a philosophy of the tragic emerged as a critical response to German Idealism, as can be noticed in philosophers such as Schelling, Hegel, Kierkegaard, and Nietzsche (see Szondi, An Essay on the Tragic). There is a philosophical history of understanding tragedy as a dialectical category. Read More

Preciosa de Joya (ICI Berlin)

THE PHILOSOPHER FARTS AND CLOWNS: HUMOR AND WISDOM IN JAVANESE PUPPET THEATRE

In its re-telling of the Mahabharata and Ramayana epics, the Javanese shadow puppet theatre introduces a wonderful repertoire of comic relief. Known as punakawan (clown-servants), Semar, and his sons, make their timely appearance immediately after gara-gara, the scene depicting the world in turmoil. But while they have captivated the hearts of spectators through laughter, the comedy, the slapstick, sexual innuendos, and obscene jokes, have largely been unexplored. Read More

Kate Katafiasz (Newman University)

COMEDY, TRAGEDY, AND RADICALISM IN EDWARD BOND'S UNDER ROOM

In The Under Room (Bond, 2006) an illegal immigrant is represented by a Dummy and a Dummy Actor. At the end of the play the immigrant has been murdered; the unwitting Dummy Actor enters, notices his own foam rubber viscera, and speaks unintelligibly. This ostensibly tragic scene may also evoke a valid comic response; comedy commonly materialises when physicality refuses to support our expectations. Read More

Anna Kawalec (John Paul II Catholic University of Lublin)

COMIC AGENTS. ALFRED GELL's NEW PARADIGM OF COMEDY

Aristotle’s distinction between tragedy and comedy, and his unambiguous preference of the former, consistently shaped the Mediterranean culture as a relatively stable cultural construct. Fortunately, many of features attributed to tragedy equally applied to the comedy, including: its philosophical nature, generality, probability, necessity, priority of the construction of the comic plot with regard to the identification of the characters (1451b), and, above all, their attribution to the category of “ the rest” (“Rest and wit are something essential in life,” Nicomachean Ethics 1128b). Read More

Alice Koubová (Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic)

TO BE LUDIC OR SACRIFICED IN PERFORMANCE? ON THE LUDIC MODE OF THINKING

The paper aims at presenting ludic theater and ludic principle in arts (I. Vyskočil, F. Kafka, J. Hašek, B. Brecht,) as a sort of counterpoint to the principle of sacrifice in theater and arts (e.g. J. Grotowski). This distinction may be seen as a variation of the genre duality of comedy and tragedy arising after the performance turn in theater practice. Performance emphasizes processuality, singularity of events, emergence, and principle of authorship in theater expression. Both sacrificed and ludic theater take these aspects as their point of departure but they format them differently. Read More

Joachim Küpper (Free University Berlin)

THE FUNCTION OF TRAGEDY

I will address the thematic frame of this panel [1] by briefly discussing some ideas concerning the function of tragedy as genre and of the “tragic” as a conceptual constellation that exists independently of the genre with which it shares a name. I will do so by drawing a comparison between Aristotle’s discussion of tragedy in the Poetics and the one drama the Stagirite marked out as “kalliste tragoedia”,...Read more

Gregor Moder (Ljubiljana University)

AFTER CATASTROPHE: FROM BECKETT TO ZIZEK

The paper analyzes the question of catastrophe in two seemingly heterogeneous frameworks: in Beckett and Žižek. Among the interpretations of Waiting for Godot, which wrongfully appears to be an easily analyzable play, the prevailing one is to inscribe it into the framework of Heidegger's or Sartre's existentialism and read it as a tragicomedy. Read more

John Morreall (College of William and Mary)

THE TRAGIC VISION AND THE COMIC VISION

Tragedy and comedy started out as forms of drama, but we now call operas, films, and novels ‘tragedies’ and ‘comedies’ too. We also view events in real life as tragic or comic. We think of the lives of certain people, and even human life in general, as tragic or as comic. Read More

Nikolaus Müller-Schöll (Goethe University Frankfurt/Main)

THE COMICAL AS PARADIGM OF THE EXPERIENCE OF MODERNITY

The comical in modernity, as I have tried to argue in different shorter and longer texts, is to be understood along the lines of the liminal category of “Ereignis” (event, radical interruption) and insofar as the paradigm of the experience of modernity. It is constitutively excluded in the process of the development of the modern dispositif of theatre in the 18th century: What is called comedy, irony or even the comical should be understood, on the one hand, as both a depiction and a distortion of the “comical”. Read more

Andrew Parker (Rutgers University)

MARX'S SHAKESPEARE AND SHAKESPEARE'S MARX: READING "ANGLISCH" (1862)

Where theater has long been acknowledged as a matrix for psychoanalytic thinking (not least by Freud himself), Marxism has seldom if ever recognized itself in or as theater. A certain resistance to theatricality is even, perhaps, constitutive for all varieties of Marxist thought... Read More

Mark Robson (Dundee University)

THE NECESSITY OF A FIGURE

Thinking through tragedy seems to demand thinking through figure and figures. But what entailments does this connection of tragedy and figure bring with it? Much rests, of course, on how we understand the notion of figure itself. Thinking on tragedy crosses senses of figure (as the figurative, that is, representational, as the geometrical, in opposition to the literal, as form of the work... Read more

Freddie Rokem (Tel Aviv University)

"THE PHILOSOPHICAL FOCAL POINT WHERE TRAGEDY AND COMEDY CONVERGE"

At the very end of Plato's Symposium, depicting the celebration of Agathon's victory in the Lenaean tragedy competition (416 B.C.), where among others Aristophanes also participated, Socrates is carrying on a conversation with the two playwrights in which he was "trying to prove to them that authors should be able to write both comedy and tragedy; the skillful tragic dramatist should also be a comic poet." (223d) But, as Apollodorus, who is Plato's story-teller adds...Read More

Katrin Trüstedt (Erfurt University)

SEA CHANGE OF COMEDY: SHAKESPEARE'S TEMPEST AND HEGELIAN DIALECTICS

For most authors writing on modernity in terms of tragedy and comedy, from Hegel and Nietzsche to Benjamin and Schmitt, Shakespeare plays an important role as a figure at the threshold of modernity, yet his late comedies, the so-called romances, have not received the explicit attention they deserve in this regard. Read more

Mischa Twitchin (Queen Mary, University of London)

IN PATAGONIA? SOME NOTES FOR A FUTURE DISCUSSION OF BECKETT'S CATASTROPHE

Besides its particular poetics, tragedy has given rise to a concept of the tragic that (as Szondi notes) distinguishes itself from – even in its “renewal” of – ancient theories. The question of seeing – of “the right to look” (Mirzoeff) – is fundamental to the meta-theatre of tragedy, where a dramaturgy of insight and of a “sight to behold” interweaves in appeal to the political. “In Patagonia?” echoes Beckett’s Catastrophe, whose very title names part of a tragic plot. Read More

Katja Vaghi (University of Roehampton)

ROCOCO LAUGHTER: DANCING AND LAUGHTER IN JIRI KYLIAN'S BIRTH-DAY

There is this idealization, possibly due to Romantic ballets (La Sylphide, Giselle, ... ) and early modern dance pioneers such as Martha Graham, of dance being only about tragedies. It seems that the comic was long considered not viable for dance, almost shunned by dancer makers. In reality, there is a great number of dance works with either a comic structure or comic sequences. Read more

Jennifer Wallace (Cambridge University)

"THE REAL STATE OF SUBLUNARY NATURE": CAN TRAGEDY AND COMEDY BE SO NEATLY DIVIDED? (AND HOW THE THEY MAKE OR UNMAKE THE WORLD?)

The distinctions between tragedy and comedy have always been somewhat blurred. Institutionally, Greek tragedy opened itself up to intertextual allusion and parody, to the satyr play finale after three tragedies, and to grotesque moments in the tragic plays themselves, while Shakespeare famously eluded generic categorization,... Read more

Daniel Watt (Loughborough University)

HOW FUNNY IS IT BEING A PLANK OF WOOD: THE TERRIBLE COMEDY OF CRICOT2 THEATRE

Cricot2 theatre, made famous by the work of Tadeusz Kantor, worked on the margins of the autobiographical for many years, seeming to represent Kantor’s history through a sepia tinged world of detritus and insanity. Superficially the sad performers of ‘The Dead Class’ and ‘Wielopole, Wielopole’ seem far from funny, condemned, as they appear to be, to an almost ghostly repetition... Read more

Stephen Wilmer (Trinity College Dublin)

THE ASYLUM SEEKER IN GREEK TRAGEDY

The exiled character in need of asylum, such as Oedipus, Medea, Orestes, Philoctetes, Antigone, et al., was a recurrent theme in ancient Greek tragedy. In Aeschylus’ The Suppliants, the fifty daughters of Danaos, fleeing from the sons of Aigyptos, arrive in Argos from overseas to ask King Pelasgos for protection. Read More

Audronė Žukauskaitė (Vilnius University)

PERFORMATIVE EVOLUTIONS: ROMEO CASTELLUCCI’S TRAGEDIA ENDOGONIDIA

Romeo Castellucci refers to the ambivalent role of the theme of tragedy in our society: on the one hand, tragedy is considered the fundamental mode of human expression, on the other hand, in the society of the spectacle our lives are completely detached from any concept of the tragic. Read More