Contemporary tragedy : the tragic subject in B.-M. Koltès, S. Pollock and D. Greig

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.