The Pathetic Fallacy of Modern Tragedy [*]

Tragic characters fight battles they cannot possibly win. That is what makes heroes out of them. However classical and modern tragedy display ontological differences whose fault line is to be found in the philosophical shift from the rationalist principle of sufficient reason to that of insufficient reason. Hence, life ceases to be a necessity imposed by the wrath of the gods to become the ordinary outcome of man’s failure. Given that, the paper will consider the different implications the Greek term hamartia assumes in the economy of classical and modern drama, and the equivalent redefinition of Weltanschauung. Modernity does not have the cosmic range of the classics, thus it is less about fate than it is about guilt.

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