Contenu du sommaire : La Tragédie : variations américaines.

The aim of the paper is to show how Stanley Cavell's reading of Shakespeare's King Lear, A Winter's Tale, Othello, and of Emerson's «Experience », reinvents the concept of tragedy, creating a specifically American concept of the tragic-as associated with a radical form of skepticism about other minds. This version of the tragic is turned around and reiterated, paradoxically, in what Cavell defines as the Hollywood comedy of remarriage, which provides a new answer to the very problems raised in Shakespearean tragedy.

In Moby-Dick, tragedy is, for character, narrator, and author alike, fundamentally a problem of mediation. Ahab may ultimately be in pursuit of a high «romantic object» ; but despite his deepening aversion to the material world, he «must use tools» to attain that goal. And «there's the rub» : the concrete world reveals itself in practice to be as little «trustworthy» as his ivory leg ; the whale-line-often « magical » at times « terrible »-does indeed turn out to be a hangman's noose. If on the level of tragic plot Ahab's metaphysical quest thus ends in the triumph of matter over spirit, the problem of mediation arises once again for narrator and author. The question is, how to give form to this « tragedy of thought » (as A. W. von Shlegel described Hamlet)-i. e., how to render Ahab's tragic greatness and make Ishmael himself a modern equivalent of the Greek chorus without falling victim to the treacheries of material representation ?

Confronting The Turn of the Screw with its Preface, this study proposes to examine how James recasts the question of the tragic in modern fantastic fiction. In The Turn of the Screw, the tragic plot, enacted by the ghosts, and artificial harnessed to what otherwise would be a mere romantic fantasy, confers to the story the aura of a prestigious genre while safely securing for the governess her position as narrator. Retracing the genealogy of the tale, the Preface suggests how «pure romance» alone, forging the figures of the ghosts, can recapture as a piece of fiction the departed spirit of the tragic.

When William Faulkner wrote about «pity and fear» in connection with his own writing, he was relying on Aristotle 's definition of the tragic «effect» as opposed to mere «pathos» or «horror». However, Faulkner's early fiction does not agree with the phenomenology of action which is indissociable from the tragic genre in Aristotle's definition. Doomed characters now perform repetitive gestures rather than irreparable deeds ; scenes of recognition or confrontation are now merely reminiscent of anagnorisis or agôn, as if the protagonists 'relation to time had been altered when the tragic hypotexts were translated into Faulkner 's modernist texts.

America has known, over the years, a number of « Electras », more or less innovative, or faithful to the Greek model. When he wrote his own version, Mourning Becomes Electra, in 1931, Eugene O'Neill wanted to write «a modern psychological play, fate springing out of the family ». In spite of some melodramatic elements, of the predominance of « gloom » over « doom », and of « sorrow » over « mourning », and even though « genes » can 't replace «genos», there are moments in which the rebellion, the « splendid failure » of two strong women transcends the anecdote and achieves tragic beauty.

Sam Shepard resurrects a sacrificial theatre in which he combines the universal and national myths with his character's domestic mythologies. The notion of sacrifice is at the core of tragedy and places the spectator in an apocalyptic perspective. However, Shepard does not escape the dialectical movement induced by the central problematics of the sacrifice and rehabilitates optimism at the very heart of tragedy. In what has often been described as the tragedy of banality, Shepard opens the tragic space to Everyman, consequently obliterating the cathartic way out. The Shepardian tragic outgrows the comforting structures of any given literary genre, be it tragedy.