1st Edition
Genre Transgressions Dialogues on Tragedy and Comedy
This collection gathers a set of provocative essays that sketch innovative and interdisciplinary approaches to Genre Theory in the 21st century.
Focusing on the interaction between tragedy and comedy, both renowned and emerging scholarly and creative voices from philosophy, theater, literature, and cultural studies come together to engage in dialogues that reconfigure genre as social, communal, and affective.
In revisiting the challenges to aesthetic categorization over the course of the 20th century, this volume proposes a shift away from the prescriptive and hierarchical reading of genre to its crucial function in shaping thought and enabling shared experience and communication. In doing so, the various essays acknowledge the diverse contexts within which genre needs to be thought afresh: media studies, rhetoric, politics, performance, and philosophy.
List of Figures
Acknowledgments
List of Contributors
The Transgressions of Genre: An Introduction
RAMONA MOSSE AND ANNA STREET
SCENE I
Tragedy and Comedy as Thought
1 Crossing the Continuum: From Tragedy’s Beginnings to Comedy’s End
CHRISTOPH MENKE AND ALENKA ZUPANČIČ
2 Sophistry, Rhetoric, and Philosophy’s Genre Problem
SIMON CRITCHLEY IN CONVERSATION WITH ANNA STREET AND RAMONA MOSSE
3 Form, Genre, History: A Dialogue
CAROLINE LEVINE AND MARTIN PUCHNER
4 Of Tragic Figures and Comic Paradigms: A Set of Provocations
MARK ROBSON AND NIKOLAUS MÜLLER-SCHÖLL
The Necessity of a Figure
MARK ROBSON
The Comic Paradigm in the Experience of Modernity
NIKOLAUS MÜLLER-SCHÖLL
Responses
SCENE 2
Dynamic Transfers Between Tragedy and Comedy
5 Laughter and the Performance of Death
R. D. V. GLASGOW AND JENNIFER WALLACE
6 Much Ado about Hamlet: An Exchange of Letters
LEONARDO LISI AND GREGOR MODER
7 Ludic Turns: Challenging the Tragedy/Comedy Dichotomy
ALICE KOUBOVÁ AND FREDDIE ROKEM
8 Reimagining the Future: Comedy and Hope
RUSSELL FORD AND H. PETER STEEVES
SCENE 3
The Performative Futures of Tragedy and Comedy
9 On Iterative Returns in Tragedy and Comedy
KATRIN TRÜSTEDT AND MATTHIAS DREYER
The Sea-Change of Comedy: Hegelian Dialectics and Shakespearean Play
KATRIN TRÜSTEDT
The Blind Spots of Tragedy: Learning with Rabih Mroué How to Dance with the Dead
MATTHIAS DREYER
Responses
10 Tragedy and the Gender of Sacrifice: On "The Difference Between Poetry and Rhetoric"
MISCHA TWITCHIN AND PIOTR GRUSZCZYNSKI
11 Tragedy and Beyond
EDWARD BOND AND KATE KATAFIASZ
Beyond the Limit: Tragedy, Society, and the Self
EDWARD BOND
Beyond Post-Drama
KATE KATAFIASZ
12 Tragedy and Transgression: A Conversation
HANS-THIES LEHMANN AND JAN FABRE
13 Of Ecstasy, Genre, and "Form-of-Life"
KÉLINA GOTMAN AND KATJA VAGHI
Index
Biography
Ramona Mosse is the Head of Theatre at the Zurich University of the Arts.
Anna Street is the Chair of the English Department and Lecturer in Theater and Performance Studies at Le Mans University in France.
