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Although they have yet to be treated together in a comparative study, Hugo von Hofmannsthal and Carl Sternheim had a number of points of convergence in their respective searches for a modern form for the serious comedy. This study documents the collegial relationship between the two authors - in part with previously unpublished archival material -, analyses their respective treatments of Molière's comedies and places this in the context of Molière's reception in the German-speaking countries since the 17th century. What emerges is a new view of the comedies of Hofmannsthal and Sternheim, which sees both dramatists applying the same technique of countermodelling Molière's constellations of comedic figures - a modern critical re-appraisal of the traditional comedic type character.
Public demand for comedy has always been high in the German-speaking countries, but the number of comic dramas that have survived is relatively small. Those which are still read or regularly performed all have a serious purpose, and this collection of fourteen essays on the most distinguished of them shows how laughter can be exploited to treat personal, moral, and social problems in a way that would not be possible in tragedy. The texts range from the seventeenth to the late twentieth century, and no fewer than half of them are by Austrian writers. The contributors show how these plays are often subversive, regularly arousing an uncomfortable, self-challenging laughter, and how they treat such widely ranging subjects as language and communication, the complications of the sex drive, the inflexibility of the Prussian mind, and the behaviour of Austrian celebrities during the Third Reich. The essays are all written by specialists in the field and were originally delivered as lectures in the University of Cambridge.
Schnitzler's Reigen, Wedekind's Die Büchse der Pandora: Eine Monstretragoedie, and Thoma's Moral and Magdalena reflect the gender inequity and interaction of their time as described in contemporary non-literary texts. The works represent a creative participation in gender discourse, taking the side of social reformers who argued for a more equitable treatment of women, including prostitutes. The discrimination endured by prostitutes, however, is simply an extreme of what all women experienced. The dramas expose male oppression of females, while simultaneously portraying what women can do in order to achieve limited independence and self-determination. Women are victims rather than victimizers, and male hypocritical attitudes cause women's suffering.
Includes the index to the Journal of the International Arthur Schnitzler Research Association, 1961-67.
The formation of identity has always been an intriguing property of human culture. Today, identity is largely understood as the product of discursive economies and as a vector of language use. At the center of this socio-linguistic framework lies the locus of identity production itself, the inscribed body, which represents prevailing schemes of order. The inscription of identity onto the body is thus a social and not an individual process, the reaction to a coalition of arbitrary stimuli rather than an unchanging organic property of human life. In this respect, we can no longer take the transcendental nature of the individual, with whom we associate the modern subject, for granted. The question is, do the bodies of earlier periods also evince signs of the individual, or is this form purely a cultural neologism? This book attempts to formulate an answer.
"The low critical opinion of dramatic adaptations of prose works makes clear that the dramatic text is widely seen as unable to compete with the narrative text that it adapts. Privileging the text of a play as the site of meaning is inadequate, however, given the social nature of theatre; rather, the socio-historical context of a production must be investigated to flesh out the meaning of the text in dramatic production. In this study, four theatrical adaptations of Franz Kafka's novel The Trial (1925) from different decades and countries, and in three different languages, illustrate a history not only of Kafka reception, but also of society, politics and theatrical practice in western Europe and Canada. The diversity of these visions of Kafka's work pleads for the acceptance of dramatic adaptation as a creative form of interpretation, rather than as an ill-advised misappropriation, of its source."