Tragic, The, in literature

The Apollonian-Dionysian duality is a mythical opposition that suggests a complex and fundamental pattern of looking at the world. In this opposition Nietzsche identified two antagonistic tendencies whose tense coexistence is a prerequisite of the tragic genre; in his formulation tragic conflict must essentially involve a tension between rationality and irrationality, at the level of plot, character, genre. I adopt this symbolic mythical pattern to explore the theme of dramatic conflict in an ancient play, Euripides's The Bacchae, and in a modern text, Schrader's screenplay Kiss of the Spider Woman. At the heart of both these dramatic works there lies a profound and balanced conflict between illusion and reality, emotion and reason, pragmatism and idealism, nature and culture, a conflict structured according to the Apollonian-Dionysian matrix. This thesis explores the connections between the two texts and reveals that their common predicament consists of an unsettled dramatic opposition of Apollonian and Dionysian imaginative realms.