Tragedy and the Tragic in German Literature, Art, and Thought

Tragedy and the Tragic in German Literature, Art, and Thought
Author: Stephen D. Dowden
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer
Total Pages: 382
Release: 2014
Genre: Art
ISBN: 1571135855

Essays in this volume seek to clarify the meaning of tragedy and the tragic in its many German contexts, art forms, and disciplines, from literature and philosophy to music, painting, and history.

Genealogy of the Tragic

Genealogy of the Tragic
Author: Joshua Billings
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Total Pages: 279
Release: 2017-03-14
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 0691176361

Why did Greek tragedy and "the tragic" come to be seen as essential to conceptions of modernity? And how has this belief affected modern understandings of Greek drama? In Genealogy of the Tragic, Joshua Billings answers these and related questions by tracing the emergence of the modern theory of the tragic, which was first developed around 1800 by thinkers associated with German Idealism. The book argues that the idea of the tragic arose in response to a new consciousness of history in the late eighteenth century, which spurred theorists to see Greek tragedy as both a unique, historically remote form and a timeless literary genre full of meaning for the present. The book offers a new interpretation of the theories of Schiller, Schelling, Hegel, Hölderlin, and others, as mediations between these historicizing and universalizing impulses, and shows the roots of their approaches in earlier discussions of Greek tragedy in Germany, France, and England. By examining eighteenth-century readings of tragedy and the interactions between idealist thinkers in detail, Genealogy of the Tragic offers the most comprehensive historical account of the tragic to date, as well as the fullest explanation of why and how the idea was used to make sense of modernity. The book argues that idealist theories remain fundamental to contemporary interpretations of Greek tragedy, and calls for a renewed engagement with philosophical questions in criticism of tragedy.

The Tragic Absolute

The Tragic Absolute
Author: David Farrell Krell
Publisher: Indiana University Press
Total Pages: 502
Release: 2005
Genre: Idealism, German
ISBN: 9780253345363

Exposes the core of tragic absolutes in German Romantic and Idealist philosophy.

The Origin of German Tragic Drama

The Origin of German Tragic Drama
Author: Walter Benjamin
Publisher: Verso Books
Total Pages: 325
Release: 2020-05-05
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1789604737

The Origin of German Tragic Drama is Walter Benjamin's most sustained and original work. It begins with a general theoretical introduction on the nature of the baroque art of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, concentrating on the peculiar stage-form of royal martyr dramas called Trauerspiel. Benjamin also comments on the engravings of Durer and the theatre of Calderon and Shakespeare. Baroque tragedy, he argues, was distinguished from classical tragedy by its shift from myth into history. Georg Lukacs, an opponent of Benjamin's aesthetics, singled out The Origin of German Tragic Drama as one of the main sources of literary modernism in the twentieth century.

A Cultural History of Tragedy in the Age of Empire

A Cultural History of Tragedy in the Age of Empire
Author: Michael Gamer
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages: 216
Release: 2021-05-20
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 1350155071

This volume traces a path across the metamorphoses of tragedy and the tragic in Western cultures during the bourgeois age of nations, revolutions, and empires, roughly delimited by the French Revolution and the First World War. Its starting point is the recognition that tragedy did not die with Romanticism, as George Steiner famously argued over half a century ago, but rather mutated and dispersed, converging into a variety of unstable, productive forms both on the stage and off. In turn, the tragic as a concept and mode transformed itself under the pressure of multiple social, historical and political-ideological phenomena. This volume therefore deploys a narrative centred on hybridization extending across media, genres, demographics, faiths both religious and secular, and national boundaries. The essays also tell a story of how tragedy and the tragic offered multiple means of capturing the increasingly fragmented perception of reality and history that emerged in the 19th century. Each chapter takes a different theme as its focus: forms and media; sites of performance and circulation; communities of production and consumption; philosophy and social theory; religion, ritual and myth; politics of city and nation; society and family, and gender and sexuality.

Nietzsche's Early Literary Writings and the Birth of Tragedy

Nietzsche's Early Literary Writings and the Birth of Tragedy
Author: Steven D. Martinson
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer
Total Pages: 305
Release: 2022
Genre:
ISBN: 1640141189

The name Friedrich Nietzsche resonates around the world. Although known primarily as a philosopher, Nietzsche began his writing career while still a boy with literary texts: poetry, prose, and dramas. The present book is the first extensive study in English of these early literary works. It understands Nietzsche in the light of his activity as a creative writer from his juvenilia through his first two years as professor of classical philology at the University of Basel, that is, through the 1872 publication of his first major work, The Birth of Tragedy Out of the Spirit of Music. Knowledge of Nietzsche's early literary writings further underscores the value of The Birth of Tragedy as a work of world literature. The present study makes available almost all of Nietzsche's early poetry and extensive excerpts from his early prose works and dramas - much of it in English for the first time - along with commentary. A final, extensive chapter on The Birth of Tragedy treats it as the culmination of the early literary works. The book contains many new insights into Nietzsche and his work and essential source material for future research. All quotations from Nietzsche are given in both the original German and in English.ions from Nietzsche are given in both the original German and in English. works. The book contains many new insights into Nietzsche and his work and essential source material for future research. All quotations from Nietzsche are given in both the original German and in English.ions from Nietzsche are given in both the original German and in English.

Thomas Bernhard's Afterlives

Thomas Bernhard's Afterlives
Author: Olaf Berwald
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
Total Pages: 265
Release: 2020-10-01
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1501351532

In his prose fiction, memoirs, poetry, and drama, Thomas Bernhard (1931-1989)--one of the 20th century's most uniquely gifted writers--created a new and radical style, seemingly out of thin air. His books never “tell a story” in the received sense. Instead, he rages on the page, he rants and spews vitriol about the moral failures of his homeland, Austria, in the long amnesiac aftermath of the Second World War. Yet this furious prose, seemingly shapeless but composed with unparalleled musicality, and taxing by conventional standards, has been powerfully echoed in many writers since Bernhard's death in 1989. These explorers have found in Bernhard's singular accomplishment new paths for the expression of life and truth. Thomas Bernhard's Afterlives examines the international mobilization of Bernhard's style. Writers in Italian, German, Spanish, Hungarian, English, and French have succeeded in making Bernhard's Austrian vision an international vision. This book tells that story.

Tragedy and the Return of the Dead

Tragedy and the Return of the Dead
Author: John D Lyons
Publisher: Northwestern University Press
Total Pages: 399
Release: 2018-05-15
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0810137119

Early modernity rediscovered tragedy in the dramas and the theoretical writings of the ancient Greeks and Romans. Attempting to make new tragic fictions, writers like Shakespeare, Webster, Hardy, Corneille, and Racine created a dramatic form that would probably have been unrecognizable to the ancient Athenians. Tragedy and the Return of the Dead recovers a model of the tragic that fits ancient tragedies, early modern tragedies, as well as contemporary narratives and films no longer called “tragic” but which perpetuate the same elements. Authoritative, wide-ranging, and thought provoking, Tragedy and the Return of the Dead uncovers a set of interlocking plots of family violence that stretch from Greek antiquity up to the popular culture of today. Casting aside the elite, idealist view that tragedy manifests the conflict between two equal goods or the human struggle against the divine, John D. Lyons looks closely at tragedy’s staging of gory and painful deaths, ignominious burials, and the haunting return of ghosts. Through this adjusted lens Le Cid, Hamlet, Frankenstein, The Spanish Tragedy, Romeo and Juliet, Phèdre, Macbeth, and other early modern works appear in a striking new light. These works are at the center of a panorama that stretches from Aeschylus’s Agamemnon to Hitchcock’s Psycho and are placed against the background of the Gothic novel, Freud’s “uncanny,” and Burke’s “sublime.” Lyons demonstrates how tragedy under other names, such as “Gothic fiction” and “thrillers,” is far from dead and continues as a vital part of popular culture.

Pathos and Anti-Pathos

Pathos and Anti-Pathos
Author: Tom Vanassche
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
Total Pages: 390
Release: 2022-12-31
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 311075858X

Scholarship often presumes that texts written about the Shoah, either by those directly involved in it or those writing its history, must always bear witness to the affective aftermath of the event, the lingering emotional effects of suffering. Drawing on the History of Emotions and on trauma theory, this monograph offers a critical study of the ambivalent attributions and expressions of emotion and “emotionlessness” in the literature and historiography of the Shoah. It addresses three phenomena: the metaphorical discourses by which emotionality and the purported lack thereof are attributed to victims and to perpetrators; the rhetoric of affective self-control and of affective distancing in fiction, testimony and historiography; and the poetics of empathy and the status of emotionality in discourses on the Shoah. Through a close analysis of a broad corpus centred around the work of W. G. Sebald, Dieter Schlesak, Ruth Klüger and Raul Hilberg, the book critically contextualises emotionality and its attributions in the post-war era, when a scepticism of pathos coincided with demands for factual rigidity. Ultimately, it invites the reader to reflect on their own affective stances towards history and its commemoration in the twenty-first century.

Spielraum: Teaching German through Theater

Spielraum: Teaching German through Theater
Author: Lisa Parkes
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 208
Release: 2021-11-03
Genre: Foreign Language Study
ISBN: 1000465977

Spielraum: Teaching German through Theater is a sourcebook and guide for teaching German language and culture, as well as social, cross-cultural, and multi-ethnic tensions, through dramatic texts. This book presents a range of theoretical and practical resources for the growing number of teachers who wish to integrate drama and theater into their foreign-language curriculum. As such, it may be adopted as a flexible tool for teachers seeking ways to reinvigorate their language classrooms through drama pedagogy; to connect language study to the study of literature and culture; to inspire curricular rejuvenation; or to embark on full-scale theater productions. Focusing on specific dramatic works from the rich German-speaking tradition, each chapter introduces unique approaches to a play, theme, and genre, while also taking into account practical issues of performance.