Archivierte Veranstaltungen Detail

Vortragende Person/Vortragende Personen:

Since its emergence in the ancient Greek polis, tragedy has not ceased to develop. Traveling through time and space from Antiquity over the early modern era up to the present day, tragedies have been adapted to different aesthetic and political settings all over the world. Our workshop aims to investigate the modes in which tragedy as genre has circulated in the past, especially in early modern times, and continues to circulate today, i.e. in postcolonial contexts. More generally, we are interested in the relation between change of place and change of form, including the limits of traveling: how does tragedy travel and what hinders or even stops its circulation?

We start from the assumption that literary forms do not only travel as a whole and they do not travel by themselves. Tragedies may migrate in parts, in different scales and they may travel in bundles, alongside with particular skills, forms of knowledge, concepts, institutions, or people. We ask for processes of fragmentation, compression and reconfiguration which enable the transfer and renewal of the genre when crossing national or cultural borders. Distinguishing between different modes of circulation, such as the circulation of codified and uncodified tragedies during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in Europe, we would like to discuss the migration of Shakespearean forms in comparison to the itinerary of the Aristotelian model as realized in classicist court tragedy and form practices related to opera seria. Thus, we consider tragedy not only as a form that travels, but also investigate the forms it takes in order to acquire mobility and allow transfer.

We are especially interested in the institutional and social frameworks that organized dissemination and relocation. As we assume that tragedy as a genre cannot travel without institutional intermediaries, it might be interesting to identify different degrees of institutionalization and to compare formal and informal ways of traveling. For instance, in early modernity the royal courts were motors of forming a classicist model of tragedy that was regulating tragedy production in Europe. In the former British colonies, Greek and Shakespearean tragedies became a crucial element in the colonial education system to implement British values overseas and strengthen colonial power. Colonial powers provided an efficient institutional infrastructure which facilitated the circulation, adaptation and contestation of ‘Western’ forms. Today we see the crucial role of universities and cultural organisations in supporting the transmission and shaping of tragedy in the postcolonial sphere. Tragedy right from its beginning had a proximity to political power in affirmative as well as critical ways. Our workshop will offer the possibility to study these proximities in a comparative perspective.