Introduction: Tragedy

"We come to tragedy by many roads. It is an immediate experience, a body of literature, a conflict of theory, an academic problem." ¹

--Modern Tragedy, Raymond Williams

When I first started planning this special issue on tragedy, in the fall of 2000, I was interested in instigating a reconsideration of the traditional bibliography on tragedy, a body of literature foundational to the field of theatre studies that had recently seemed to fall out of critical favor. I was curious to see whether theatre and performance scholars were currently engaging this literature and, if so, how this work might illuminate current cultural events and social experiences that might be loosely understood as "tragic."

I approached a colleague whom I admire at an academic conference about a possible contribution to this special issue. She was surprised that I would be interested in reviving what had been for her, so endlessly rehearsed to such little gain in post-World War II theatre criticism. From her perspective, the idea of yet another round of genre questions--What is tragedy? Could there be a tragicomedy? How do we define Modern tragedy?--felt regressive and irrelevant. In part, the current critical reservations about tragedy are no doubt produced by the reservations about genre studies more generally. The sense that genre studies, a critical endeavor whose history since Aristotle has been inextricably linked with formalism, might itself be the problem was voiced by others whom I spoke to about this special issue. While I understood this position and to an extent even shared it, I still felt it might be possible to rehabilitate the discourse on the tragic to see how it could speak to us now. In other words, the study of tragedy does not need to be reduced to limited discussions of genre. I continued to be drawn to a set of questions about tragedy that extended beyond my own scholarly investments in the topic.

Taking into account the seismic shifts in literary, cultural, and performance studies over the past several decades, I wanted to return to the literature of tragedy and see how it might be reimagined in light of these recent critical insights and methods. ² Certainly, I felt, the relevance of tragedy was as pressing for the contemporary moment as it was sixty years ago, in the post-war years. In fact, I was struck by the incommensurability between the reality of the world in which we lived--a world of terrible suffering and loss, a world that seems at times evacuated of hope, a world in which these feelings have been normalized as well, simply, life--and the theatre criticism of our era. How was it that we had come to abandon thinking about tragedy as intellectuals and scholars of the performing arts in the midst of world struggles? Was the idea of tragedy--as an aesthetic, as an ideology, as a philosophy, as an "immediate experience"--outdated? Did the work of such philosophers as Hegel, Nietzsche, Benjamin, Sartre, and Williams, all of whom wrote on tragedy and theatre, exhaust our own thinking on the topic? If this was the case, how had tragedy, as a way of thinking about theatre, let alone the world, fallen out of critical favor? What might be gained by revisiting the world and its theatre through the perspective of tragedy? These were some of the questions that first launched this special issue.

My own interest in tragedy stemmed in part from my academic training in comparative literature and the emphasis that my Ph.D. program at the University of Wisconsin-Madison placed on genre studies and literary history. But there were other unanticipated events that also led me to the literature of tragedy. My graduate training occurred side by side with the onslaught of AIDS. The bibliography of tragedy, especially the work of Raymond Williams, not only informed my intellectual growth but also offered me a philosophy that would structure my worldview in light of the suffering and loss of a generation of gay men who...