“Peripeteia” and “Ecstasy of Catastrophe”: Figures of Tragedy in the Novels of Proust and Joyce
Abstract
The paper considers the presence of subjects and structures belonging to the aesthetics of the tragic in the work of Marcel Proust and James Joyce. In the first place, the authors’ meditations on tragedies and on the concept of the tragic are compared; the influence derived from tragic plays such as Racine’s Phèdre and Shakespeare’s Hamlet is then analysed and commented on, following the intertextual links and their echo in the characters and plots in the Recherche and Ulysses. Finally, we seek to understand how the tragic meaning of events is developed beyond its aesthetic implications.
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