Truth in tragedy: truth in tragedy toward an epistemology of the tragic fact

This work is an attempt to question the very concept of tragedy and the tragic. It starts out with the premise that tragedy is a discourse which, in its developing, sometimes contributes to, but more often challenges the invention, production, and solidification of knowledge, including such notions as those of the subject, individual will, reason, power, and responsibility. Its starting point relies on the acknowledgement that the separation between literature and life, between tragedy and the tragic, of the domain between the utterances of some self-identity – called the subject, or the Self – and that conceived from the activity of one other – the Other -, the separation between the individual and the social, of desire and societal demands, of subjectivity and objectivity, all of these mark the place of a particular ideological order: they indicate a specifiable semiotic field whose functioning is also, or at least partly, the result of a development in the discourse of tragedy. The broader philosophical framework in which this work is embedded is the relation between literature – tragedy as a theatrical literary work in particular - and truth: is it possible to gain knowledge from literature? If the answer is affirmative, which kind of knowledge will it be? Is it peculiar only to literature or does it share commonalities with other kind of social practices and discourses? Is there something characteristically inherent only to tragedy that render available this knowledge to us? I will attempt to show the specific epistemic role played by tragedy in the formation of modern discourses, tying it in closely with developments in philosophy, science, political theory, and the development of the market. The observation that tragedy flourished in historical periods of high epistemic uncertainty, suggests the elaboration of our working hypothesis: tragedy will be defined as a discourse endowed with an epistemic function whose nature will be clarified along this work, specifically in its relation with what will become the dominant (class of) discourse. For this reason, we will focus on Early Modern England and Shakespeare, examining tragedy as a discursive process that help organizing or even shapes, a particular reality. After the introduction where we posit the theoretical framework that informs this work, in chapter one we will review the ongoing philosophical debate about the relationship between literature and knowledge, with an emphasis on the problem of theatre, illusion, and truth; we will then consider two examples as case studies to support our hypothesis; chapter two will be dedicated to a close reading of Hamlet, where we show that the impossibility of meaning – or the fact that meaning is construed by the utterer – is enclosed and expelled from the dominant discourse highlighting how characters acquire and negotiate knowledge; chapter three will be devoted to Macbeth and the problem of how human beings experiment and make sense of time; we will also consider Macbeth as an important step toward the construction of the Western Subject. Chapter four concludes showing how the development of tragedy is concomitant with that of not only an essentially political discourse, both theoretical and practical, but also with that of a critical discourse generated by the dominant order that we call analytico-referential. We finally conclude in chapter five with an attempt to redefinition of the early novel as a literary genre: endowing the early novel with an epistemic function – like we did for tragedy – we will see the dialectic relation of a partial continuity between tragedy and the novel; examples taken from Macbeth and Robinson Crusoe will prover the efficacy of our claim