Arthur Schnitzler and Twentieth-century Criticism

Arthur Schnitzler and Twentieth-century Criticism
Author: Andrew C. Wisely
Publisher: Camden House
Total Pages: 226
Release: 2004
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 9781571130884

An analysis of the scholarly criticism of the great Viennese writer up to the year 2000. Schnitzler, one of the most prolific Austrian writers of the 20th century, ruthlessly dissected his society's erotic posturing and phobias about sex and death. His most penetrating analyses include Lieutenant Gustl, the first stream-of-consciousness novella in German; Reigen, a devastating cycle of one-acts mapping the social limits of a sexual daisy-chain; and Der Weg ins Freie, a novel that combines a love story with a discussion ofthe roadblocks facing Austria's Jews. Today, his popularity is reflected by new editions and translations and by adaptations for theater, television, and film by artists such as Tom Stoppard and Stanley Kubrick. This book examinesSchnitzler reception up to 2000, beginning with the journalistic reception of the early plays. Before being suspended by a decade of Nazism, criticism in the 1920s and 30s emphasized Schnitzler's determinism and decadence. Not until the early 60s was humanist scholarship able to challenge this verdict by pointing out Schnitzler's ethical indictment of impressionism in the late novellas. During the same period, Schnitzler, whom Freud considered his literary "Doppelgänger," was often subjected to Freudian psychoanalytical criticism; but by the 80s, scholarship was citing his own thoroughgoing objections to such categories. Since the 70s, Schnitzler's remonstrance toward the Austrianestablishment has been examined by social historians and feminist critics alike, and the recently completed ten-volume edition of Schnitzler's diary has met with vibrant interest. Andrew C. Wisely is associate professor of German at Baylor University.

The Road to the Open

The Road to the Open
Author: Arthur Schnitzler
Publisher: Pickle Partners Publishing
Total Pages: 573
Release: 2018-03-12
Genre: History
ISBN: 1789120802

This English translation of Arthur Schnitzler’s “Der Weg ins Freie” (1908) was first published in 1913 and is one of only two novels—the other being “Therese” (1928)—by the Viennese author, who was better known for his short stories and plays, including “Reigen” (“Round Dance”), known to most English-speaking readers as “La Ronde.” “The Road to the Open” tells the story of the aristocratic young composer Georg von Wergenthin-Recco who has talent but lacks the drive to get down to work and spends most of his time socializing with members of the assimilationist, artistically sensitive Jewish bourgeoisie of Vienna and other non-Jews like himself who enjoy their company. A love affair with a Catholic lower middle class girl, combined with the author’s authentic descriptions of the milieu, the arts, the psychology of love, and the anti-Semitism that was coming to dominate so much of life and politics in the Austria-Hungary of the time, make this novel a classic. “One of the most important, representative, revelatory works of Austria at the turn of the century....The best English version of the novel.”—Marc A. Weiner, Indiana University “In Arthur Schnitzler the two strands of Austrian fin-de-siècle culture, the moralistic and the aesthetic, were present in almost equal proportions. Small wonder that Freud hailed Schnitzler as a ‘colleague’ in the investigation of the ‘underestimated and much-maligned erotic.’”—Carl Schorske, author of Fin-de-Siècle Vienna

Stereotype and Destiny in Arthur Schnitzler’s Prose

Stereotype and Destiny in Arthur Schnitzler’s Prose
Author: Marie Kolkenbrock
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
Total Pages: 280
Release: 2018-02-08
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1501330985

What was the function of the invocation of destiny in the increasingly secularized era of turn-of-the-century Vienna? By exploring this question, Stereotype and Destiny in Arthur Schnitzler's Prose offers a new psycho-sociological perspective on the narrative works of Arthur Schnitzler. While Vienna 1900 as a site of crisis has been established in the scholarship, this book focuses on the presence of forces that deny the existence of said crisis and work to contain its subversive and critical potential. Stereotype and destiny emerge in Schnitzler's prose texts as a form of these counter-critical forces. In her readings, Kolkenbrock shows that stereotype and destiny serve as an interrelated coping mechanism for a central psychological conflict of modernity: the paradoxical need to be recognized as 'normal' and 'special' at the same time. While, through the complex of "stereotype and destiny," Schnitzler's prose addresses central modern questions of identity and subjecthood, Kolkenbrock's close readings also reveal how the texts inscribe themselves aesthetically in the literary tradition of Romanticism and as such offer crucial sources for understanding Schnitzler's representations of embattled subjecthood within broader social and aesthetic traditions.

Twentieth-century Literary Criticism

Twentieth-century Literary Criticism
Author: Gale Research Company
Publisher:
Total Pages: 666
Release: 1999
Genre: Literature
ISBN:

Excerpts from criticism of the works of novelists, poets, playwrights, and other creative writers, 1900-1960.

The Routledge Encyclopedia of Jewish Writers of the Twentieth Century

The Routledge Encyclopedia of Jewish Writers of the Twentieth Century
Author: Sorrel Kerbel
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 1716
Release: 2004-11-23
Genre: History
ISBN: 1135456062

Now available in paperback for the first time, Jewish Writers of the Twentieth Century is both a comprehensive reference resource and a springboard for further study. This volume: examines canonical Jewish writers, less well-known authors of Yiddish and Hebrew, and emerging Israeli writers includes entries on figures as diverse as Marcel Proust, Franz Kafka, Tristan Tzara, Eugene Ionesco, Harold Pinter, Tom Stoppard, Arthur Miller, Saul Bellow, Nadine Gordimer, and Woody Allen contains introductory essays on Jewish-American writing, Holocaust literature and memoirs, Yiddish writing, and Anglo-Jewish literature provides a chronology of twentieth-century Jewish writers. Compiled by expert contributors, this book contains over 330 entries on individual authors, each consisting of a biography, a list of selected publications, a scholarly essay on their work and suggestions for further reading.

Hands Around [Reigen]: A Cycle of Ten Dialogues

Hands Around [Reigen]: A Cycle of Ten Dialogues
Author: Arthur Schnitzler
Publisher: DigiCat
Total Pages: 120
Release: 2022-06-02
Genre: Drama
ISBN:

Hands Around is a famous play with provocative sexual themes. It examines its time's sexual morality and class ideology through consecutive interactions between two characters before or after a sexual encounter. The characters include a prostitute, a soldier, A parlor maid, a young gentleman, a young wife, a husband, a Miss, a poet, an actress, and a count. By picking characters from all levels of society, the play offers social commentary on how sexual interaction breaks class boundaries. The play follows the suppression and flooding of sexuality in a psychologically exciting way. In addition, it paints a unique picture of sexual intercourse, as if Schnitzler is saying that love is unreliable. He wants to tell the readers that infidelity isn't something that only streetwalkers and soldiers participate in, but the nobility, the wealthy, and the world's artists also partake in it. It is a truly exceptional and unforgettable play that evoked strong reactions from people when it was first published.

Late Fame

Late Fame
Author: Arthur Schnitzler
Publisher: Pushkin Press
Total Pages: 120
Release: 2015-10-08
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1782272208

First English publication of a recently rediscovered novella by one of the greatest European writers One seemingly ordinary evening, Eduard Saxberger arrives home to find the fulfilment of a long-forgotten wish in his sitting room: a visitor has come to tell him that the youth of Vienna have discovered his poetic genius. Saxberger has written nothing for thirty years, yet he now realises that he is more than merely an Unremarkable Civil Servant, after all: a Venerable Poet, for whom Late Fame is inevitable - if, that is, his new acolytes are to be believed... Arthur Schnitzler was one of the most admired, provocative European writers of the twentieth century. The Nazis attempted to burn all of his work, but his archive was miraculously saved, and with it, Late Fame. Never published before, it is a treasure, a perfect satire of literary self-regard and charlatanism. Arthur Schnitzler (b. 1862 in Vienna) was one of the most influential European writers of the twentieth century, perhaps best known here for his novellas Dream Story and Fräulein Else. He qualified as a doctor but was increasingly driven to a career in writing, resulting in several celebrated plays, novellas and novels which explore the great existential subjects of the modern age: relationships, love, sex, ageing and death. Because his work dealt with subjects considered taboo, he frequently attracted the hostility of the authorities, consequently losing his position as Chief Medic in the Reserve Army and being tried for disorderly conduct. Schnitzler was close friends with Stefan Zweig and Sigmund Freud, who both admired him greatly, and a member of the 'Young Vienna' circle of writers who regularly met at a café nicknamed 'Café Megalomania' - the very same clique and café he satirises so deliciously in Late Fame. Schnitzler died in 1931. Pushkin Press also publishes his novellas Fräulein Else, Dying and Casanova's Return to Venice.

Twentieth-century Literary Criticism

Twentieth-century Literary Criticism
Author: Dedria Bryfonski
Publisher:
Total Pages: 568
Release: 1981
Genre: American literature
ISBN: 9780810301788

Contains alphabetically arranged entries that provide a selection of critical excerpts on the works of thirty authors who lived between 1900 and 1960, each including a biographical/critical introduction, a list of principal works, and a bibliographical citation.

The Rhetoric of Topics and Forms

The Rhetoric of Topics and Forms
Author: Gianna Zocco
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
Total Pages: 639
Release: 2021-01-18
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 3110641984

The fourth volume of the collected papers of the ICLA congress “The Many Languages of Comparative Literature” includes articles that study thematic and formal elements of literary texts. Although the question of prioritizing either the level of content or that of form has often provoked controversies, most contributions here treat them as internally connected. While theoretical considerations inform many of the readings, the main interest of most articles can be described as rhetorical (in the widest sense) – given that the ancient discipline of rhetoric did not only include the study of rhetorical figures and tropes such as metaphor, irony, or satire, but also that of topoi, which were originally viewed as the ‘places’ where certain arguments could be found, but later came to represent the arguments or intellectual themes themselves. Another feature shared by most of the articles is the tendency of ‘undeclared thematology’, which not only reflects the persistence of the charge of positivism, but also shows that most scholars prefer to locate themselves within more specific, often interdisciplinary fields of literary study. In this sense, this volume does not only prove the ongoing relevance of traditional fields such as rhetoric and thematology, but provides contributions to currently flourishing research areas, among them literary multilingualism, literature and emotions, and ecocriticism.

Twentieth-Century Humanist Critics

Twentieth-Century Humanist Critics
Author: William Calin
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
Total Pages: 281
Release: 2007-01-01
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0802094759

The Twentieth-Century Humanist Critics revisits the work and place of eight scholars roughly contemporary with Anglo-American New Criticism: Leo Spitzer, Ernst Robert Curtius, Erich Auerbach, Albert Béguin, Jean Rousset, C.S. Lewis, F.O. Matthiessen, and Northrop Frye. William Calin first considers the achievements of each critic, examining his methodology and basic presuppositions as well as the critiques marshalled against him. Calin explores their relation to history, to canon-formation, and to our current theoretical debates. He then goes on to show how all eight form a current in the history of criticism related to both humanism and modernism. Underscoring the international, cosmopolitian aspects of literary scholarship in the twentieth century, The Twentieth-Century Humanist Critics brings together humanist critical traditions from Europe, the United Kingdom, and North America and reveals the surprising extent to which, in various languages and academic systems, critics were posing similar questions and offering a gamut of similar responses.