Back to the Future of Tragedy: Some Notes on Brecht's Reading of Shakespeare

Abstract

This article revisits Brechtian tragedy through a posthumanist reading framed through reference, particularly, to the work of N. Katherine Hayles, doing so in the context of broader questions about how genres decline (e.g. the pastoral, the georgic, the epic though not, inevitably, the tragic). The de-centring of humanistic assumptions and practices would seem to invite a re-visioning of the tragic, one shorn of traditional generic and affective certainties, and attentive to new technological imperatives.