Abstract
This article departs from a close reading of Mark Ravenhill’s Faust (Faust is Dead) and argues that the play in its radical postmodern sensibilities asks fundamental questions about the future of the tragic hero in contemporary playwriting. One of its central notions is Fukuyama’s megalothymia to denote the human drive to compete with one another. As Fukuyama has delineated in his book The End of History and the Last Man (1992), man has lost this drive and is lost in an apathetic existence. It is this state of lethargy that can be noticed in Ravenhill’s play, and that also explains the use of cruelty, as a means to undo this posthuman, desireless existence. Consequently, the tragic hero has become a spectator in his own drama.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Callens, J. (2000). Sorting out ontologies in Mark Ravenhill’s Faust (Faust Is Dead). In E. Voigts-Virchow (Ed.), Mediated drama, dramatized media, CDE (Vol. 7, pp. 167–177). Trier: Wissenschaftlicher Verlag.
De Vos, L. (2011). Cruelty and desire in the modern theater. Antonin Artaud, Sarah Kane, and Samuel Beckett. Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press.
Freud, S. (1953). Psychopathic characters on the stage. In The standard edition of the complete psychological works (Vol. VII, pp. 303–310). London: The Hogarth Press.
Fukuyama, F. (1992). The end of history and the last man. New York: Free Press.
Fukuyama, F. (2002). Our posthuman future. Consequences of the biotechnology revolution. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
Kane, S. (1998). Gespräch mit Sarah Kane. In N. Tabert (Ed.), Playspotting. Die Londoner Theaterszene der 90er (pp. 8–21). Reinbeck bei Hamburg: Rowohlt.
Miller, J. (2000). The passion of Michel Foucault. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Ravenhill, M. (1997). Faust (Faust is dead). London: Methuen.
Ravenhill, M. (2004). A tear in the fabric: The James Bulger murder and new theatre writing in the nineties. New Theatre Quarterly, 20(4), 305–314.
Scarry, E. (1985). The body in pain. The making and unmaking of the world. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Sierz, A. (2000). In-yer-face theatre. British drama today. London: Faber & Faber.
Steiner, G. (1996). Tragedy, pure and simple. In M. S. Silk (Ed.), Tragedy and the tragic (pp. 534–546). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
De Vos, L. Faust is Dead. Mark Ravenhill’s View on a Posthuman Era. Neophilologus 96, 651–659 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11061-012-9306-4
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11061-012-9306-4