| This dissertation challenges the prevailing idea that modern tragedy is a failed or impossible dramatic form. Considering texts by Gabriele D'Annunzio, Luigi Pirandello, Alberto Moravia and Pier Paolo Pasolini, it demonstrates how these playwrights reinvent tragedy through an intertextual engagement with Greek and Shakespearean drama. The introductory chapter elaborates the political implications of Greek tragedy and defines the term "intertextuality" as it is used in this project. The four plays explored in the dissertation all present an understanding of tragedy as a figure and forum for human encounter. Accordingly, the two arenas in whose context these authors recuperate ancient tragedy are those of politics and of creative practice (art).Through an analysis in conjunction with the paratextual novel Ilfuoco, the second chapter posits D'Annunzio's first tragedy Citta morta as the artistic parable of the author's successful tragic project, thus refuting the common critical claim that D'Annunzio's tragic practice falls short of its elaborate theorization. The following chapter examines how Pirandello completes this association in his most famous play, Sei personaggi in cerca d'autore (1921), demonstrating how the Sicilian crystallizes his understanding of the figure of tragedy through the fictional character's confrontation with its embodiment, that is, his or her assumption of corporeal form.Chapter four details how, from his earliest literary endeavors, Moravia develops an understanding of tragedy not merely or primarily as a genre, but rather as an ethos. Far from affirming the exhaustion of the Greek tragic paradigm, Moravia recuperates tragedy as the prime mode through which men and women of the post-war period can surrender the wounds and errors of the past and overcome the shame of living. Similarly, Pasolini imagines the theater as the locus of a new medium of understanding centered in the act of embodied narration, a lesson that the ancient myth still supplies, despite the permanent disruption of the Oedipal order. This concluding chapter discusses Affabulazione, one of Pasolini's six tragedies initiated in the spring of 1966. Pasolini's formulation of tragedy not only reflects the formulations of D'Annunzio, Pirandello and (his friend) Moravia, but also returns us firmly to the original ancient Greek faith in the power of embodied speech, that is, the combination of utterance and appearance that the creators of the polis held as the true measure of human existence, and in whose honor the art of tragedy was invented. |
