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akademiskacademic quarterkvarterVolume 03.Efterår 2011 • on the webTransgression as Tragic TypologyO’Neill’s Mourning Becomes Electra and Kushner’s Angelsin AmericaMia RendixAssistant professor, PhD. in Comperative literature.Researches American literature with special focuson tragedy. Currently involved in a European projecton copyright and digitalization, where she workson Bildung and copyright.The English playwright and critic Howard Brenton pinpoints thescholarly discussion of tragedy and the tragic in his review of TerryEagleton’s Sweet Violence: The Idea of the Tragic from 2002: ”thedoomed search for the holy grail of literary criticism, a definitionof tragedy” (Guardian, 2002) 1 . Ever since the Greeks presentedtheir tragedies at the annual Dionysos Festivals, the two conceptshave been doomed to lead an ambigious existence: Tragedy andthe tragic bear an aura of aristocracy, the sublime, the noble, theelevated. But it is also, perhaps, the most controversial and debatedliterary genre of all. Literary critics, scolars and philosophersfrom both sides of the ideological spectre declared the genrealtmodisch and anachronistic when God was declared dead byNietzsche et al. The conservatives talked with great sadness of thedeath of tragedy:”The difference is that conservative critics believe, alongwith Nietzsche, that tragedy has died since we no longerbelieve in fate and the gods. This they lament: a properappreciation of the darkness of human hearts has “ruinouslyyielded in our time to chance, contingency, democracy,rationality, religious disenchantment and a callowprogressivism”. As Steiner puts it: “At the touch of HumeVolume03 213