In recent years, Hjalmar Söderberg’s novel Doktor Glas (1905) has been conceived as more complex compared to its contemporary interpretations, and has been associated with many different ideas. The novel stands the test of time and forces readers to reflect on difficult issues. However, only sporadic attention has been paid to the connection between Doktor Glas and tragedy, hidden in the form of direct references or allusions to Greek antiquity and occasional reminiscences of Greek tragedy.    Tragedy is a branch of drama and for centuries Aristotle’s Poetics offered the only definition of tragedy available. Nevertheless, renowned philosophers and thinkers have offered alternative definitions of tragedy that describe aspects of tragedy not adressed by Aristotle; the list of tragic requirements seems to change and vary through the ages and by extension the term may be applied to ”a conception of the tragic”.     This thesis explores the experience of tragedy and the tragic in Doktor Glas. That will be accomplished with four idea analyses of the novel, each one from a different ”tragic” point of view. In other words, through dialogue between the novel and the tragic conception as conceived by Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Arthur Schopenhauer, Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche and Albert Camus in order to embody in the novel the ”image” of the tragic as created by each of the above-mentioned important philosophers and thinkers, with focus directed towards the old question of the aristotelian term katharsis. One of the main results of the present study is that from a ”tragic” point of view, Doktor Glas is remarkably modern.    The author aims to perform a divergent, still creative approach to the ambiguous Doktor Glas according to her background and previous education in the anthropocentic discipline of studies in Classical Philology.

In the 1969 Le Thor seminar, Heidegger stated that his philosophical journey could be characterized by three different themes: meaning, truth, place. The first two of these have been the subject of countless studies and discussions, but the question of place is still relatively unexplored in Heidegger’s thought, despite the increased interest for this topic in his writings. Even though scholars like Jeff Malpas, Edward Casey, Stuart Elden and Miguel de Beistegui have written books and essays on the importance of the conception of place in Heidegger’s thinking, there are still many important aspects of this theme to be discussed, given the importance Heidegger himself ascribed to this topic. In this essay, I therefore wish to pose the question of how one can understand the relation between place and the role of tragedy in Heidegger’s conception of truth. My bearing thesis will be that these three concepts: place, truth and tragedy stand in a symbiotic relationship to each other and thus form the foundation of the Heideggerian thinking of place, or topological thinking. For this reason, the purpose of this paper is to present an interpretation of how the tragic is grasped in its relation to place. This I will do by turning to three texts from the period in Heidegger’s thought which has come to be known as ‘the turn’, a period which usually is understood to have occurred in the 1930s and the early 1940s. The texts I have in mind are for one the aesthetic essay The Origin of the Work of Art, and secondly the two interpretations of the first chorus from Antigone, found in Introduction to Metaphysics and Hölderlin’s Hymn ‘The Ister’. The Origin of the Work of Art can thus be said to serve as a theoretical introduction or framework to Heidegger’s conception of truth, whereas my analysis of the two interpretations from Antigone will look closer into how truth explicitly can be said to stand in a dependent relationship to place and tragedy. This becomes particularly relevant in the part of the interpretation where Heidegger puts emphasis on the word polis, a word he understands as the place or the There where truth resides. However, one cannot write on this topic without mentioning the political problems this gives rise to, considering the time and place and by whom the texts were written. Therefore I will have an ongoing discussion of this problematic aspect in the topological thinking of Heidegger, which I will intertwine in the text. This is not to say that my sole ambition is to point out the despicable in Heidegger’s political engagement (which should be obvious), but rather to try to give a foundation for discussion on whether it’s possible to find a way to think productively on the theme of place, truth and tragedy.

Uppsatsens centrala tes är att tanken på den eviga återkomsten i Nietzsches prosadikt Så talade Zarathustra kan förstås som ett tragiskt ögonblick. För att kunna avhandla denna tes ställs den avgörande frågan: Vad avses med 'tragiskt ögonblick'? Jag söker syftesbestämma detta begrepp inom ramarna för den tyska idealismens tanketradition, där Schelling och Schopenhauer tjänar som exempel. Denna specifika förståelse av det tragiskas begrepp är att särskilja från genrebestämningar av tragedin. / The central thesis of this paper is that the thought of the eternal return in Nietzsche's work Thus spoke Zarathustra can be interpreted as a tragic moment. For proving this thesis, it is necessary to clearly understand how the concept of the metaphysically revelatory tragic moment within the tradition of German idealism differs from a genre-definition of tragedy. I use Schelling's and Schopenhauer's philosophies of art as examples of cases in German idealism where the tragic moment has been considered metaphysically revelatory. Thereupon I adjudicate whether the thought of the eternal return can qualify as such a moment.