Tragedy today: two contemporary rewritings of the myth of Antigone

Abstract

The still hot question of whether tragedy is possible today is discussed by great critics such as George Steiner [1963] and Albin Lesky [1957] with positions that do not fully coincide. We will compare here their proposals, and to this end we will analyse from both perspectives two contemporary rewritings of the myth of Antigone: Antigone [1942] by the French playwright Jean Anouilh and La tumba de Antígona [The Tomb of Antigone, 1967] by the Spanish philosopher and writer María Zambrano, which, as we shall see, maintain a dissimilar intertextual relationship with Sophocles’ Antigone.