Abstract

This work is partly based on an essay by Giorgio Agamben devoted to Dante and the distinction between comedy and tragedy. Making use of some of Agamben’s notions, this paper seeks to reconfigure the issue of the tragic-comic intersection, drawing on the theories about the Bildungsroman, the novel of formation, and the heterogeneity of the novelistic discourse in a wider sense. Finally, a parallel is drawn between Marcel Proust and Franz Kafka (with Walter Benjamin and Franco Rella), putting forward the hypothesis that, following the reconfiguration of the contact between tragic and comic, novelistic discourse also includes a revision of the categories of time and subject.

Keywords:
tragedy; comedy; novel of education; time; subject