Enlightenment tragedy

This thesis is an investigation of the tragic form in relation to Horkheimer and Adorno’s Dialectic of Enlightenment. Horkheimer and Adorno claim that the culture industry has appropriated the tragic form for its own purposes and rendered it a part of the process of the conversion of the individual to exploitable circuits of value. Enlightenment Tragedy is a type of tragedy that avoids their critique, and in fact offers the reader tools to resist the culture industry in a de-reifying moment. This thesis investigates Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida, and Flannery O’Connor’s “Good Country People” and “Revelation” and locates the characteristics that mark them as instances of this tragedy