University of Pennsylvania ScholarlyCommons Publicly Accessible Penn Dissertations 2018 Subjectivity And Politics In Pasolini's Bourgeois Tragic Theater Andrew Korn University of Pennsylvania,
[email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://repository.upenn.edu/edissertations Part of the Italian Literature Commons, Philosophy Commons, and the Theatre and Performance Studies Commons Recommended Citation Korn, Andrew, "Subjectivity And Politics In Pasolini's Bourgeois Tragic Theater" (2018). Publicly Accessible Penn Dissertations. 3139. https://repository.upenn.edu/edissertations/3139 This paper is posted at ScholarlyCommons. https://repository.upenn.edu/edissertations/3139 For more information, please contact
[email protected]. Subjectivity And Politics In Pasolini's Bourgeois Tragic Theater Abstract Italian author Pier Paolo Pasolini wrote his plays Affabulazione, Orgia and Porcile during his shift to theater in the late 1960s as a critical response to consumer culture in Italy and the West more generally. For him, this expanding mass, petit-bourgeois civilization displaced Italy’s premodern cultures and their sense of the sacred. In his plays, his bourgeois protagonists re-experience the sacred and undergo conversion. The works engender his new “bourgeois tragic” genre, in which the sacred’s return destroys modern subjectivity. They offer a unique examination of this subjectivity, its radicalizing breakdown and the potential radical politics that could emerge from that breakdown. To further these significant insights, this study systematically theorizes Pasolini’s Bourgeois Tragic Theater – his dramatic genre and its production through his “Word Theater” practices – as one of bourgeois subjectivity and politics. It is the first of its kind among the Italian- and English-language criticism, framed through psychoanalysis and classical and twentieth-century Western theater.