Richard Halpern
- Published in print:
- 2017
- Published Online:
- September 2017
- ISBN:
- 9780226433653
- eISBN:
- 9780226433790
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of Chicago Press
- DOI:
- 10.7208/chicago/9780226433790.003.0004
- Subject:
- Literature, Drama
Christopher Marlowe occupies a world in which theater first becomes a fully commercial enterprise. As an independent playwright, Marlowe produces works that cannot be artistically or financially ...
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Christopher Marlowe occupies a world in which theater first becomes a fully commercial enterprise. As an independent playwright, Marlowe produces works that cannot be artistically or financially realized without the stage as means of production, an apparatus over which he exerts no control. I argue that this alienated condition is reflected in Faustus’ contract with Mephastophilis—a contract that grants Faustus powers through an apparatus that he, too, can command but not ultimately manage. Essentially a source of special effects, Mephastophilis embodies the powers of theatrical capital, thereby allowing Marlowe to reflect upon both the futility of the dramatic text without theatrical embodiment, and, conversely, the finally disappointing resources that the theater can provide. The lack inherent to both parties opens up into a more general investigation by the play into a realm of the negative or void that manifests itself on ethical, aesthetic, theological, and ontological levels. Ultimately, the precocious modernity of Doctor Faustus involves envisioning a world at once capitalist and Protestant in which action is impossible without dependence on some enabling apparatus or mechanism from which one is nevertheless alienated and over which one can therefore exert at best a provisional kind of control.Less
Christopher Marlowe occupies a world in which theater first becomes a fully commercial enterprise. As an independent playwright, Marlowe produces works that cannot be artistically or financially realized without the stage as means of production, an apparatus over which he exerts no control. I argue that this alienated condition is reflected in Faustus’ contract with Mephastophilis—a contract that grants Faustus powers through an apparatus that he, too, can command but not ultimately manage. Essentially a source of special effects, Mephastophilis embodies the powers of theatrical capital, thereby allowing Marlowe to reflect upon both the futility of the dramatic text without theatrical embodiment, and, conversely, the finally disappointing resources that the theater can provide. The lack inherent to both parties opens up into a more general investigation by the play into a realm of the negative or void that manifests itself on ethical, aesthetic, theological, and ontological levels. Ultimately, the precocious modernity of Doctor Faustus involves envisioning a world at once capitalist and Protestant in which action is impossible without dependence on some enabling apparatus or mechanism from which one is nevertheless alienated and over which one can therefore exert at best a provisional kind of control.
Katherine Steele Brokaw
- Published in print:
- 2016
- Published Online:
- January 2017
- ISBN:
- 9781501703140
- eISBN:
- 9781501705915
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Cornell University Press
- DOI:
- 10.7591/cornell/9781501703140.003.0005
- Subject:
- Literature, 16th-century and Renaissance Literature
This chapter argues that Christopher Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus exposes music, magic, and religion as culturally interdependent and all reliant on the human-produced theatricality of sound to give them ...
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This chapter argues that Christopher Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus exposes music, magic, and religion as culturally interdependent and all reliant on the human-produced theatricality of sound to give them the illusion of divine or magical power and authority; this illusion masks their inability to make real truth claims. The chapter begins by discussing the material and epistemic failures of sensual pleasure, natural magic, and necromancy. It then explores the Pope’s excommunication ritual as revelatory of the social and political power of religion’s sound effects. Next, it considers the sound effects of heaven and hell at the end of the play—effects that reveal how eschatology, particularly the concepts of heaven and hell, are reliant on theatrical tricks. The final section describes the play’s one surety, examining how the bell-ringing accompanying Faustus’ final moment pits the surety of death against the uncertainty of claims for divine understanding.Less
This chapter argues that Christopher Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus exposes music, magic, and religion as culturally interdependent and all reliant on the human-produced theatricality of sound to give them the illusion of divine or magical power and authority; this illusion masks their inability to make real truth claims. The chapter begins by discussing the material and epistemic failures of sensual pleasure, natural magic, and necromancy. It then explores the Pope’s excommunication ritual as revelatory of the social and political power of religion’s sound effects. Next, it considers the sound effects of heaven and hell at the end of the play—effects that reveal how eschatology, particularly the concepts of heaven and hell, are reliant on theatrical tricks. The final section describes the play’s one surety, examining how the bell-ringing accompanying Faustus’ final moment pits the surety of death against the uncertainty of claims for divine understanding.
Heather Hirschfeld
- Published in print:
- 2014
- Published Online:
- August 2016
- ISBN:
- 9780801452741
- eISBN:
- 9780801470639
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Cornell University Press
- DOI:
- 10.7591/cornell/9780801452741.003.0003
- Subject:
- Literature, Shakespeare Studies
This chapter demonstrates how Doctor Faustus' fascination with hell—Western culture's imagined site of eternal dissatisfaction—was a symptom of its protagonist's inability to qualify or quantify what ...
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This chapter demonstrates how Doctor Faustus' fascination with hell—Western culture's imagined site of eternal dissatisfaction—was a symptom of its protagonist's inability to qualify or quantify what counts as “enough.” It argues that the play's generic and penitential impulses take shape as an underworld journey as much as they do a psychomachia. The “form of Faustus' fortunes” has much in common with the cycle drama, or at least the event of Christ's descent into hell. The chapter examines the economies of satisfaction present in contemporary understandings of hell. It then turns to the theological and literary debates around Christ's descent to hell to show how they flow into Faustus's own salvific concerns, making him the center of a contorted harrowing of hell play.Less
This chapter demonstrates how Doctor Faustus' fascination with hell—Western culture's imagined site of eternal dissatisfaction—was a symptom of its protagonist's inability to qualify or quantify what counts as “enough.” It argues that the play's generic and penitential impulses take shape as an underworld journey as much as they do a psychomachia. The “form of Faustus' fortunes” has much in common with the cycle drama, or at least the event of Christ's descent into hell. The chapter examines the economies of satisfaction present in contemporary understandings of hell. It then turns to the theological and literary debates around Christ's descent to hell to show how they flow into Faustus's own salvific concerns, making him the center of a contorted harrowing of hell play.
Ehrhard Bahr
- Published in print:
- 2007
- Published Online:
- March 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780520251281
- eISBN:
- 9780520933804
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of California Press
- DOI:
- 10.1525/california/9780520251281.003.0011
- Subject:
- History, American History: 20th Century
In the fashion of exile dialectics, Thomas Mann proposed the “identity of the non-identical” and said: “There are not two Germanys, a good one and a bad one, but only one, whose best turned into evil ...
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In the fashion of exile dialectics, Thomas Mann proposed the “identity of the non-identical” and said: “There are not two Germanys, a good one and a bad one, but only one, whose best turned into evil through devilish cunning. Wicked Germany is merely good Germany gone astray, good Germany in misfortune, in guilt, and ruin.” This chapter explores the role of dialectics as a structural element in Mann's novel Doctor Faustus. Mann's collaboration with Theodor W. Adorno reinforced this element not only as the essence of Faust's career as a German composer, but also as the basis for the allegory of Germany and its history. In addition, Adorno's concept of the “identity of the non-identical” enabled Mann to show that the life and works of Adrian Leverkühn not only reflected German history, but also contradicted it. The “identity of the non-identical” also became a structural element for Leverkühn's last composition, which marked his “breakthrough” as an authentic work of modernist art. It functions both as “historiography of its epoch” (Adorno) as well as an expression of human suffering.Less
In the fashion of exile dialectics, Thomas Mann proposed the “identity of the non-identical” and said: “There are not two Germanys, a good one and a bad one, but only one, whose best turned into evil through devilish cunning. Wicked Germany is merely good Germany gone astray, good Germany in misfortune, in guilt, and ruin.” This chapter explores the role of dialectics as a structural element in Mann's novel Doctor Faustus. Mann's collaboration with Theodor W. Adorno reinforced this element not only as the essence of Faust's career as a German composer, but also as the basis for the allegory of Germany and its history. In addition, Adorno's concept of the “identity of the non-identical” enabled Mann to show that the life and works of Adrian Leverkühn not only reflected German history, but also contradicted it. The “identity of the non-identical” also became a structural element for Leverkühn's last composition, which marked his “breakthrough” as an authentic work of modernist art. It functions both as “historiography of its epoch” (Adorno) as well as an expression of human suffering.
Richard Hoffmann
- Published in print:
- 2018
- Published Online:
- January 2019
- ISBN:
- 9780520296824
- eISBN:
- 9780520969155
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of California Press
- DOI:
- 10.1525/california/9780520296824.003.0004
- Subject:
- Music, Theory, Analysis, Composition
This chapter presents a firsthand account by Arnold Schoenberg's assistant Richard Hoffmann and an analytical essay by Bernhold Schmid. Among the anecdotes that Hoffmann shares is how he was ...
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This chapter presents a firsthand account by Arnold Schoenberg's assistant Richard Hoffmann and an analytical essay by Bernhold Schmid. Among the anecdotes that Hoffmann shares is how he was requested to record those sections of Doctor Faustus which dealt, in some way, with music, and how Schoenberg would smile in appreciation as he played and replayed these excerpts at his leisure. Schmid's essay deals with the long and bitter dispute between Arnold Schoenberg and Thomas Mann. The dispute is structured into two phases: one concerns the private sphere, which ended with a postscript added to Doctor Faustus by Mann, and Schoenberg's letter of thanks; and the other the public sphere, initiated by Schoenberg with a letter to the Saturday Review of Literature, which resulted in the press engaging in the dispute.Less
This chapter presents a firsthand account by Arnold Schoenberg's assistant Richard Hoffmann and an analytical essay by Bernhold Schmid. Among the anecdotes that Hoffmann shares is how he was requested to record those sections of Doctor Faustus which dealt, in some way, with music, and how Schoenberg would smile in appreciation as he played and replayed these excerpts at his leisure. Schmid's essay deals with the long and bitter dispute between Arnold Schoenberg and Thomas Mann. The dispute is structured into two phases: one concerns the private sphere, which ended with a postscript added to Doctor Faustus by Mann, and Schoenberg's letter of thanks; and the other the public sphere, initiated by Schoenberg with a letter to the Saturday Review of Literature, which resulted in the press engaging in the dispute.
Adrian Daub
E. Randol Schoenberg (ed.)
- Published in print:
- 2018
- Published Online:
- January 2019
- ISBN:
- 9780520296824
- eISBN:
- 9780520969155
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of California Press
- DOI:
- 10.1525/california/9780520296824.003.0003
- Subject:
- Music, Theory, Analysis, Composition
This section presents the letters, excepts from diaries, and other materials exchanged and/or written after Thomas Mann's delivery of a copy of Doctor Faustus to Arnold Schoenberg in January of 1948.
This section presents the letters, excepts from diaries, and other materials exchanged and/or written after Thomas Mann's delivery of a copy of Doctor Faustus to Arnold Schoenberg in January of 1948.
Adrian Daub
- Published in print:
- 2018
- Published Online:
- January 2019
- ISBN:
- 9780520296824
- eISBN:
- 9780520969155
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of California Press
- DOI:
- 10.1525/california/9780520296824.003.0001
- Subject:
- Music, Theory, Analysis, Composition
This introductory chapter provides the necessary context for the two protagonists (Arnold Schoenberg and Thomas Mann), as well as the leading supporting figure (Theodor Adorno). It aims to guide ...
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This introductory chapter provides the necessary context for the two protagonists (Arnold Schoenberg and Thomas Mann), as well as the leading supporting figure (Theodor Adorno). It aims to guide readers through the thicket of acquaintances, old grudges and new anxieties, problems of politics and aesthetics that resonate—sometimes faintly, sometimes clearly—between the lines in the essays and exchanges gathered in this volume. These are, after all, one reason scholars, students, and lay readers have returned to the Faustus controversy time and time again. The other is that rarely has a literary controversy spoken so directly to a unique place and time: Faustus could not have been written, and Faustus could not have generated the controversy that it did, outside of the highly peculiar setting of Southern California during the Second World War.Less
This introductory chapter provides the necessary context for the two protagonists (Arnold Schoenberg and Thomas Mann), as well as the leading supporting figure (Theodor Adorno). It aims to guide readers through the thicket of acquaintances, old grudges and new anxieties, problems of politics and aesthetics that resonate—sometimes faintly, sometimes clearly—between the lines in the essays and exchanges gathered in this volume. These are, after all, one reason scholars, students, and lay readers have returned to the Faustus controversy time and time again. The other is that rarely has a literary controversy spoken so directly to a unique place and time: Faustus could not have been written, and Faustus could not have generated the controversy that it did, outside of the highly peculiar setting of Southern California during the Second World War.
The late A. D. Nuttall
- Published in print:
- 1998
- Published Online:
- October 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780198184621
- eISBN:
- 9780191674327
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198184621.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, Poetry, Drama
The Trinity of orthodox Christianity is harmonious. The Trinity for Blake is, conspicuously, not a happy family: the Father and the Son do not get on. It might be thought that so cumbersome a notion ...
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The Trinity of orthodox Christianity is harmonious. The Trinity for Blake is, conspicuously, not a happy family: the Father and the Son do not get on. It might be thought that so cumbersome a notion is inconceivable before the rise of Romanticism but the Ophite Gnostics of the 2nd century AD appear to have thought that God the Father was a jealous tyrant because he forbade Adam and Eve to eat from the Tree of Knowledge and that the serpent, who led the way to the Tree of Knowledge, was really Christ. This book explores the possibility of an underground ‘perennial heresy’, linking the Ophites to Blake. The ‘alternative Trinity’ is intermittently visible in Marlowe's Doctor Faustus and even in Milton's Paradise Lost. Blake's notorious detection of a pro-Satan anti-poem, latent in this ‘theologically patriarchal’ epic is less capricious, better grounded historically and philosophically, than is commonly realised.Less
The Trinity of orthodox Christianity is harmonious. The Trinity for Blake is, conspicuously, not a happy family: the Father and the Son do not get on. It might be thought that so cumbersome a notion is inconceivable before the rise of Romanticism but the Ophite Gnostics of the 2nd century AD appear to have thought that God the Father was a jealous tyrant because he forbade Adam and Eve to eat from the Tree of Knowledge and that the serpent, who led the way to the Tree of Knowledge, was really Christ. This book explores the possibility of an underground ‘perennial heresy’, linking the Ophites to Blake. The ‘alternative Trinity’ is intermittently visible in Marlowe's Doctor Faustus and even in Milton's Paradise Lost. Blake's notorious detection of a pro-Satan anti-poem, latent in this ‘theologically patriarchal’ epic is less capricious, better grounded historically and philosophically, than is commonly realised.
Ehrhard Bahr
- Published in print:
- 2007
- Published Online:
- March 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780520251281
- eISBN:
- 9780520933804
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- University of California Press
- DOI:
- 10.1525/california/9780520251281.001.0001
- Subject:
- History, American History: 20th Century
In the 1930s and 1940s, Los Angeles became an unlikely cultural sanctuary for a distinguished group of German artists and intellectuals—including Thomas Mann, Theodore W. Adorno, Bertolt Brecht, ...
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In the 1930s and 1940s, Los Angeles became an unlikely cultural sanctuary for a distinguished group of German artists and intellectuals—including Thomas Mann, Theodore W. Adorno, Bertolt Brecht, Fritz Lang, and Arnold Schoenberg—who had fled Nazi Germany. During their years in exile, they would produce a substantial body of major works to address the crisis of modernism that resulted from the rise of National Socialism. Weimar Germany and its culture, with its meld of eighteenth-century German classicism and twentieth-century modernism, served as a touchstone for this group of diverse talents and opinions. This is the first book to examine these artists and intellectuals as a group. It looks at selected works of Adorno, Schoenberg, Brecht, Lang, Mann, Max Horkheimer, Richard Joseph Neutra, Rudolph Michael Schindler, and Alfred Döblin, and weighs Los Angeles's influence on them and their impact on German modernism. Touching on such examples as film noir and Mann's Doctor Faustus, the book shows how this community of exiles reconstituted modernism in the face of the traumatic political and historical changes they were living through.Less
In the 1930s and 1940s, Los Angeles became an unlikely cultural sanctuary for a distinguished group of German artists and intellectuals—including Thomas Mann, Theodore W. Adorno, Bertolt Brecht, Fritz Lang, and Arnold Schoenberg—who had fled Nazi Germany. During their years in exile, they would produce a substantial body of major works to address the crisis of modernism that resulted from the rise of National Socialism. Weimar Germany and its culture, with its meld of eighteenth-century German classicism and twentieth-century modernism, served as a touchstone for this group of diverse talents and opinions. This is the first book to examine these artists and intellectuals as a group. It looks at selected works of Adorno, Schoenberg, Brecht, Lang, Mann, Max Horkheimer, Richard Joseph Neutra, Rudolph Michael Schindler, and Alfred Döblin, and weighs Los Angeles's influence on them and their impact on German modernism. Touching on such examples as film noir and Mann's Doctor Faustus, the book shows how this community of exiles reconstituted modernism in the face of the traumatic political and historical changes they were living through.
Ehrhard Bahr
- Published in print:
- 2007
- Published Online:
- March 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780520251281
- eISBN:
- 9780520933804
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of California Press
- DOI:
- 10.1525/california/9780520251281.003.0012
- Subject:
- History, American History: 20th Century
This chapter revisits the controversy between Thomas Mann and Arnold Schoenberg regarding the employment of twelve-tone composition in Doctor Faustus. It draws on the conflict to show that Mann had ...
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This chapter revisits the controversy between Thomas Mann and Arnold Schoenberg regarding the employment of twelve-tone composition in Doctor Faustus. It draws on the conflict to show that Mann had the highest respect for the composer and his achievements. Mann's personal dedication to Schoenberg in a copy of Doctor Faustus indicates that he was aware that the composer represented the true modernist; a recognition that his Faust figure never deserved until perhaps his last composition. Schoenberg's choral and instrumental music, composed in Los Angeles, is presented as the most important achievement of exile modernism in its refusal to make compromises with mass culture and its attempts to find content and forms that speak to contemporary audiences. Finally, the chapter compares the corpus of Schoenberg's exile compositions to the works of his fellow exiles: Mann, Bertolt Brecht, Alfred Döblin, and Franz Werfel.Less
This chapter revisits the controversy between Thomas Mann and Arnold Schoenberg regarding the employment of twelve-tone composition in Doctor Faustus. It draws on the conflict to show that Mann had the highest respect for the composer and his achievements. Mann's personal dedication to Schoenberg in a copy of Doctor Faustus indicates that he was aware that the composer represented the true modernist; a recognition that his Faust figure never deserved until perhaps his last composition. Schoenberg's choral and instrumental music, composed in Los Angeles, is presented as the most important achievement of exile modernism in its refusal to make compromises with mass culture and its attempts to find content and forms that speak to contemporary audiences. Finally, the chapter compares the corpus of Schoenberg's exile compositions to the works of his fellow exiles: Mann, Bertolt Brecht, Alfred Döblin, and Franz Werfel.
E. Randol Schoenberg (ed.)
- Published in print:
- 2018
- Published Online:
- January 2019
- ISBN:
- 9780520296824
- eISBN:
- 9780520969155
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- University of California Press
- DOI:
- 10.1525/california/9780520296824.001.0001
- Subject:
- Music, Theory, Analysis, Composition
Arnold Schoenberg and Thomas Mann, two towering figures of twentieth-century music and literature, both found refuge in the German-exile community in Los Angeles during the Nazi era. This complete ...
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Arnold Schoenberg and Thomas Mann, two towering figures of twentieth-century music and literature, both found refuge in the German-exile community in Los Angeles during the Nazi era. This complete edition of their correspondence provides a glimpse inside their private and public lives and culminates in the famous dispute over Mann's novel Doctor Faustus. In the thick of the controversy was Theodor Adorno, then a budding philosopher, whose contribution to the Faustus affair would make him an enemy of both families. Gathered here for the first time in English, the letters are complemented by diary entries, related articles, and other primary source materials, as well as an introduction that contextualizes the impact that these two great artists had on twentieth-century thought and culture.Less
Arnold Schoenberg and Thomas Mann, two towering figures of twentieth-century music and literature, both found refuge in the German-exile community in Los Angeles during the Nazi era. This complete edition of their correspondence provides a glimpse inside their private and public lives and culminates in the famous dispute over Mann's novel Doctor Faustus. In the thick of the controversy was Theodor Adorno, then a budding philosopher, whose contribution to the Faustus affair would make him an enemy of both families. Gathered here for the first time in English, the letters are complemented by diary entries, related articles, and other primary source materials, as well as an introduction that contextualizes the impact that these two great artists had on twentieth-century thought and culture.
Alison Milbank
- Published in print:
- 2018
- Published Online:
- November 2018
- ISBN:
- 9780198824466
- eISBN:
- 9780191863257
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/oso/9780198824466.003.0008
- Subject:
- Religion, Religion and Literature
Chapter 7 outlines the nature of Reformation anthropology as Gothic in the sense of being under the power of the usurper, Satan, and in seeing God as wrathful enemy before justification by faith. It ...
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Chapter 7 outlines the nature of Reformation anthropology as Gothic in the sense of being under the power of the usurper, Satan, and in seeing God as wrathful enemy before justification by faith. It examines Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus in relation to the Lutheran Faustbook, and as an example of a character who wishes to escape the ambiguities of election in favour of a settled reprobation. Calvinist double predestination is shown to produce a dualist subjectivity, and this is then explored in a series of Scottish Presbyterian Gothic fictions: James Hogg’s Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner, Stevenson’s Jekyll and Hyde and Markheim, and John Buchan’s historical tale of demon-worshipping Covenanters, Witch Wood. It is argued that the protagonists’ problem is not duality as such but an attempt to circumvent it, and that the Calvinist anthropology is not itself the problem, although it requires ‘Anglican’ mediation.Less
Chapter 7 outlines the nature of Reformation anthropology as Gothic in the sense of being under the power of the usurper, Satan, and in seeing God as wrathful enemy before justification by faith. It examines Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus in relation to the Lutheran Faustbook, and as an example of a character who wishes to escape the ambiguities of election in favour of a settled reprobation. Calvinist double predestination is shown to produce a dualist subjectivity, and this is then explored in a series of Scottish Presbyterian Gothic fictions: James Hogg’s Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner, Stevenson’s Jekyll and Hyde and Markheim, and John Buchan’s historical tale of demon-worshipping Covenanters, Witch Wood. It is argued that the protagonists’ problem is not duality as such but an attempt to circumvent it, and that the Calvinist anthropology is not itself the problem, although it requires ‘Anglican’ mediation.
Ehrhard Bahr
- Published in print:
- 2007
- Published Online:
- March 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780520251281
- eISBN:
- 9780520933804
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of California Press
- DOI:
- 10.1525/california/9780520251281.003.0001
- Subject:
- History, American History: 20th Century
The city of Los Angeles afforded the refugees from Nazi-occupied Europe a haven from persecution, and a place to live and work until the end of World War II. The presence of these German-speaking ...
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The city of Los Angeles afforded the refugees from Nazi-occupied Europe a haven from persecution, and a place to live and work until the end of World War II. The presence of these German-speaking exiles conferred upon the city the moniker “Weimar on the Pacific.” Los Angeles became the battlefield for the wars of German exile modernism in the 1940s, with Bertolt Brecht, Lion Feuchtwanger, and Heinrich Mann on the left; Alfred Döblin and Franz Werfel on the right; and Thomas Mann and Arnold Schoenberg in the middle. This book is about this distinguished group of German artists and intellectuals and some of their works. It explores topics ranging from Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer's Dialectic of Enlightenment, to Brecht's lyric poetry and his drama Galileo, immigrant modernism versus exile modernism, the political factions among the exiles with respect to the rise of fascism in Germany, the role of dialectics as a structural element in Mann's novel Doctor Faustus, and the controversy between Mann and Schoenberg regarding the employment of twelve-tone composition in Doctor Faustus.Less
The city of Los Angeles afforded the refugees from Nazi-occupied Europe a haven from persecution, and a place to live and work until the end of World War II. The presence of these German-speaking exiles conferred upon the city the moniker “Weimar on the Pacific.” Los Angeles became the battlefield for the wars of German exile modernism in the 1940s, with Bertolt Brecht, Lion Feuchtwanger, and Heinrich Mann on the left; Alfred Döblin and Franz Werfel on the right; and Thomas Mann and Arnold Schoenberg in the middle. This book is about this distinguished group of German artists and intellectuals and some of their works. It explores topics ranging from Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer's Dialectic of Enlightenment, to Brecht's lyric poetry and his drama Galileo, immigrant modernism versus exile modernism, the political factions among the exiles with respect to the rise of fascism in Germany, the role of dialectics as a structural element in Mann's novel Doctor Faustus, and the controversy between Mann and Schoenberg regarding the employment of twelve-tone composition in Doctor Faustus.
Richard Hillman
- Published in print:
- 2012
- Published Online:
- May 2015
- ISBN:
- 9780719087172
- eISBN:
- 9781781706343
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Manchester University Press
- DOI:
- 10.7228/manchester/9780719087172.003.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, Shakespeare Studies
This chapter provides a discussion of the book’s intertextual method and a survey of its contents. The relation between theory and practice is set out, and illustrations are given to show how unduly ...
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This chapter provides a discussion of the book’s intertextual method and a survey of its contents. The relation between theory and practice is set out, and illustrations are given to show how unduly narrow ideas about an early modern dramatist’s use of sources may limit the range of meanings perceived by critics and potentially accessible to contemporary audiences. North’s Plutarch is introduced in relation to its French original, the translation by Jacques Amyot, and, particularly, to that translation’s edition by Simon Goulart. A soliloquy from Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus is approached by way of its recognised English (from German) source and a possible French one. The perennial question of Shakespeare’s knowledge of French is addressed, as is that of his possible access to more obscure, less obviously ‘literary’, French texts and contexts.Less
This chapter provides a discussion of the book’s intertextual method and a survey of its contents. The relation between theory and practice is set out, and illustrations are given to show how unduly narrow ideas about an early modern dramatist’s use of sources may limit the range of meanings perceived by critics and potentially accessible to contemporary audiences. North’s Plutarch is introduced in relation to its French original, the translation by Jacques Amyot, and, particularly, to that translation’s edition by Simon Goulart. A soliloquy from Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus is approached by way of its recognised English (from German) source and a possible French one. The perennial question of Shakespeare’s knowledge of French is addressed, as is that of his possible access to more obscure, less obviously ‘literary’, French texts and contexts.
Adrian Daub
E. Randol Schoenberg (ed.)
- Published in print:
- 2018
- Published Online:
- January 2019
- ISBN:
- 9780520296824
- eISBN:
- 9780520969155
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of California Press
- DOI:
- 10.1525/california/9780520296824.003.0002
- Subject:
- Music, Theory, Analysis, Composition
This section presents the letters, excerpts from diaries, and other materials exchanged and/or written before Thomas Mann's delivery of a copy of Doctor Faustus to Arnold Schoenberg in January of ...
More
This section presents the letters, excerpts from diaries, and other materials exchanged and/or written before Thomas Mann's delivery of a copy of Doctor Faustus to Arnold Schoenberg in January of 1948.Less
This section presents the letters, excerpts from diaries, and other materials exchanged and/or written before Thomas Mann's delivery of a copy of Doctor Faustus to Arnold Schoenberg in January of 1948.
Joseph Auner
- Published in print:
- 2003
- Published Online:
- October 2013
- ISBN:
- 9780300095401
- eISBN:
- 9780300127126
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Yale University Press
- DOI:
- 10.12987/yale/9780300095401.003.0007
- Subject:
- Music, Theory, Analysis, Composition
This chapter focuses on Arnold Schoenberg's final years spanning 1944 to 1951, starting with his retirement from teaching at the University of California at Los Angeles to his death. It begins with ...
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This chapter focuses on Arnold Schoenberg's final years spanning 1944 to 1951, starting with his retirement from teaching at the University of California at Los Angeles to his death. It begins with his canon for Richard Rodzinski, the son of Artur Rodzinski, who had conducted several of Schoenberg's works, two of which were Ode to Napoleon and Violin Concerto. It then presents his views on contemporary composers and conducting, his proposal for a Record-of-the-Month Club, his String Trio, Op. 45 (1946), the performance of new music, the Holocaust, art and science, abstract art and politics, Theodor Wiesengrund Adorno's philosophy of modern music, twelve-tone composition, the founding of the state of Israel, and prayer and superstition. It also looks at Schoenberg's conflict with Thomas Mann concerning the latter's 1947 novel Doctor Faustus and his appointment as honorary president of the Israel Academy of Music.Less
This chapter focuses on Arnold Schoenberg's final years spanning 1944 to 1951, starting with his retirement from teaching at the University of California at Los Angeles to his death. It begins with his canon for Richard Rodzinski, the son of Artur Rodzinski, who had conducted several of Schoenberg's works, two of which were Ode to Napoleon and Violin Concerto. It then presents his views on contemporary composers and conducting, his proposal for a Record-of-the-Month Club, his String Trio, Op. 45 (1946), the performance of new music, the Holocaust, art and science, abstract art and politics, Theodor Wiesengrund Adorno's philosophy of modern music, twelve-tone composition, the founding of the state of Israel, and prayer and superstition. It also looks at Schoenberg's conflict with Thomas Mann concerning the latter's 1947 novel Doctor Faustus and his appointment as honorary president of the Israel Academy of Music.
Wendy Beth Hyman
- Published in print:
- 2019
- Published Online:
- May 2019
- ISBN:
- 9780198837510
- eISBN:
- 9780191874154
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/oso/9780198837510.003.0006
- Subject:
- Literature, 17th-century and Restoration Literature, 16th-century and Renaissance Literature
The afterword, “Learning to Imagine What We Know” attempts to articulate a material poetics, rather than a metaphysics, of the mind in extremis, at the places where life, time, representation, and ...
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The afterword, “Learning to Imagine What We Know” attempts to articulate a material poetics, rather than a metaphysics, of the mind in extremis, at the places where life, time, representation, and knowledge can go no further. Deleuze, in “The Simulacrum and Ancient Philosophy,” contends that “the atom is that which must be thought, and that which can only be thought.” Angus Fletcher, in the chapter “Marlowe Invents the Deadline,” makes a stunningly similar claim: “Time, finally, can only be thought.”Impossible Desire recognizes the elusive hymen, too, as a conceptual morsel that fuses sexual and epistemological conquest. It demarcates, and arouses a desire to transcend, the limit point of human knowledge. But this erotically charged search for knowledge occurs, for the carpe diem poet, in the absence of teleology. He recognizes no promise of full revelation, and only a perpetually receding horizon of further things unknown. Despite this, he uses poetry to create unlikely but capacious domains for the unthinkable, an aspiration identified as an act of world-making. As George Steiner puts it, “deep inside every ‘art-act’ lies the dream of an absolute leap out of nothingness, of the invention of an enunciatory shape so new, so singular to its begetter, that it would, literally, leave the previous world behind.” The conclusion of Impossible Desire locates this ontological leap in carpe diem poetry’s attempt to expand the increments of existence within the interstices of poetry, ultimately the only mortal place wherein one can make “this one short Point of Time/… fill up half the Orb of Round Eternity.”Less
The afterword, “Learning to Imagine What We Know” attempts to articulate a material poetics, rather than a metaphysics, of the mind in extremis, at the places where life, time, representation, and knowledge can go no further. Deleuze, in “The Simulacrum and Ancient Philosophy,” contends that “the atom is that which must be thought, and that which can only be thought.” Angus Fletcher, in the chapter “Marlowe Invents the Deadline,” makes a stunningly similar claim: “Time, finally, can only be thought.”Impossible Desire recognizes the elusive hymen, too, as a conceptual morsel that fuses sexual and epistemological conquest. It demarcates, and arouses a desire to transcend, the limit point of human knowledge. But this erotically charged search for knowledge occurs, for the carpe diem poet, in the absence of teleology. He recognizes no promise of full revelation, and only a perpetually receding horizon of further things unknown. Despite this, he uses poetry to create unlikely but capacious domains for the unthinkable, an aspiration identified as an act of world-making. As George Steiner puts it, “deep inside every ‘art-act’ lies the dream of an absolute leap out of nothingness, of the invention of an enunciatory shape so new, so singular to its begetter, that it would, literally, leave the previous world behind.” The conclusion of Impossible Desire locates this ontological leap in carpe diem poetry’s attempt to expand the increments of existence within the interstices of poetry, ultimately the only mortal place wherein one can make “this one short Point of Time/… fill up half the Orb of Round Eternity.”
Jerrold Levinson
- Published in print:
- 2016
- Published Online:
- December 2016
- ISBN:
- 9780198767213
- eISBN:
- 9780191821813
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198767213.003.0007
- Subject:
- Philosophy, Aesthetics
This short, somewhat personal, chapter addresses itself to the phenomenon of falling in love with a work of literature, focusing on the case of novels with which one can become enamoured. It ...
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This short, somewhat personal, chapter addresses itself to the phenomenon of falling in love with a work of literature, focusing on the case of novels with which one can become enamoured. It endeavours to limn the most salient features of the phenomenon, highlighting similarities and differences with the rather more familiar phenomenon of falling in love with a person, and venturing some thoughts on what makes a work of literature apt to elicit a positive reaction of this character. Toward the end of the chapter the dangers of an intense absorption of this sort, whether in regard to books or to persons, are briefly acknowledged.Less
This short, somewhat personal, chapter addresses itself to the phenomenon of falling in love with a work of literature, focusing on the case of novels with which one can become enamoured. It endeavours to limn the most salient features of the phenomenon, highlighting similarities and differences with the rather more familiar phenomenon of falling in love with a person, and venturing some thoughts on what makes a work of literature apt to elicit a positive reaction of this character. Toward the end of the chapter the dangers of an intense absorption of this sort, whether in regard to books or to persons, are briefly acknowledged.
