Gregory Reid: Terry Eagleton’s Sweet Violence and the Architectuality of Dramas by Bolt, Dubé and Albee

In his recent anatomy, Sweet Violence: The Idea of the Tragic, Terry Eagleton relocates what I would call “redemptive tragedy” from the margins of the canon of “great tragedies” to its centre.  The tragic, in Eagleton’s telling, finds its essence where the Jesus and Oedipus stories overlap; in the pharmakos ritual, the scapegoat sacrificed if not obviously for the greater good at least to expiate the sins of the community.  My proposed presentation is a comparison of Carol Bolt’s One Night Stand (a play which compares very strongly with Albee’s Zoo Story) and Marcel Dubé’s Un Matin comme les autres (a play frequently compared to Albee’s Whose Afraid of Virginia Woolf) against Eagleton's notions of the tragic. My tentative conclusion (ie, hypothesis) is that the comparison delineates the architectual distinctions between tragedy and satire, and the thematic or discursive difference between the tragic and the absurd.