CONTEMPORARY TRAGEDY

The changes in our contemporary world, especially the devolution of the previously absolute values, led us to believe that the conditions for the tragedy we used to know disappeared. Consequently, the mentioned process gave rise to the  increasingly popular idea of the “death” of tragedy. Yet, our every-day life keeps proving that these theories missed the mark : in addition to sundry events that deserve to be called tragic, our lives have not changed much in this sense either. All that brings the question of the dramatic tragic genre back to life again.

This study attempts to establish the foundation for the contemporary tragedy by following two paths: the first re-evaluates the conditions that Aristotle established for the genre while the second examines the present-day state of the subject as the basic carrier of the tragic sentiment. The outcome of this study suggests that instead of the Aristotelian “character” and the Hegelian “action,” it is the tragic “situation” that establishes the contemporary tragedy.

A professor at the University of Primorska, Koper, Slovenia, Krištof Jacek Kozak received his PhD in Comparative Literature from the University of Alberta, Canada. He has published two books: Attractively Fated: Subject and Tragedy (translated into Serbian and Slovak), and The Aesthetics and Ideas in Josip Vidmar’s Pre-War Drama and Theatre Criticisms (1998). His research focuses on modernist and contemporary drama, in particular the tradition of tragedy and tragic elements in contemporary theatre, culture and society, Slovenian drama between the two world wars, and philosophy of literature with special attention to drama.

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