Blair Hoxby
- Published in print:
- 2009
- Published Online:
- June 2013
- ISBN:
- 9780804763806
- eISBN:
- 9780804773508
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Stanford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.11126/stanford/9780804763806.003.0005
- Subject:
- Literature, Criticism/Theory
This chapter proposes a revised theory of allegory in baroque tragic drama. It rejects Walter Benjamin's contention in The Origin of German Tragic Drama (1928) that the Trauerspiel or “tragic drama” ...
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This chapter proposes a revised theory of allegory in baroque tragic drama. It rejects Walter Benjamin's contention in The Origin of German Tragic Drama (1928) that the Trauerspiel or “tragic drama” is a demonstration of mourning and melancholy distinctly different from “tragedy” that triggers a response of mourning. Instead, it argues that “tragic drama” employs allegorical modes together with dramatic mimesis to create an experience of mourning. In challenging and expanding Benjamin's notions of the genre, the chapter examines John Ford's The Broken Heart (1629–1633), a tragedy that is replete with the accoutrements of death consistent with Benjamin's description of the Trauerspiel. Through a detailed reading of Nahum Tate and Henry Purcell's Dido and Aeneas (1684–1689), however, it also illustrates how the trappings of mourning are not essential to the form. Thus, the experience of tragic drama is aligned with seventeenth-century expectations about the pleasure of mourning.Less
This chapter proposes a revised theory of allegory in baroque tragic drama. It rejects Walter Benjamin's contention in The Origin of German Tragic Drama (1928) that the Trauerspiel or “tragic drama” is a demonstration of mourning and melancholy distinctly different from “tragedy” that triggers a response of mourning. Instead, it argues that “tragic drama” employs allegorical modes together with dramatic mimesis to create an experience of mourning. In challenging and expanding Benjamin's notions of the genre, the chapter examines John Ford's The Broken Heart (1629–1633), a tragedy that is replete with the accoutrements of death consistent with Benjamin's description of the Trauerspiel. Through a detailed reading of Nahum Tate and Henry Purcell's Dido and Aeneas (1684–1689), however, it also illustrates how the trappings of mourning are not essential to the form. Thus, the experience of tragic drama is aligned with seventeenth-century expectations about the pleasure of mourning.
Jane O. Newman
- Published in print:
- 2011
- Published Online:
- August 2016
- ISBN:
- 9780801476594
- eISBN:
- 9780801460883
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Cornell University Press
- DOI:
- 10.7591/cornell/9780801476594.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, European Literature
This book offers a reading of Walter Benjamin's notoriously opaque work, Origin of the German Tragic Drama that systematically attends to its place in discussions of the Baroque in Benjamin's day. ...
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This book offers a reading of Walter Benjamin's notoriously opaque work, Origin of the German Tragic Drama that systematically attends to its place in discussions of the Baroque in Benjamin's day. The book recovers Benjamin's relationship to the ideologically loaded readings of the literature and political theory of the seventeenth-century Baroque that abounded in Germany during the political and economic crises of the Weimar years. To date, the significance of the Baroque for Origin of the German Tragic Drama has been glossed over by students of Benjamin, most of whom have neither read it in this context nor engaged with the often incongruous debates about the period that filled both academic and popular texts in the years leading up to and following World War I. The book shows the extent to which Benjamin participated in these debates by reconstructing the literal and figurative history of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century books that Benjamin analyzes and the literary, art historical and art theoretical, and political theological discussions of the Baroque with which he was familiar. In so doing, it challenges the exceptionalist, even hagiographic, approaches that have become common in Benjamin studies.Less
This book offers a reading of Walter Benjamin's notoriously opaque work, Origin of the German Tragic Drama that systematically attends to its place in discussions of the Baroque in Benjamin's day. The book recovers Benjamin's relationship to the ideologically loaded readings of the literature and political theory of the seventeenth-century Baroque that abounded in Germany during the political and economic crises of the Weimar years. To date, the significance of the Baroque for Origin of the German Tragic Drama has been glossed over by students of Benjamin, most of whom have neither read it in this context nor engaged with the often incongruous debates about the period that filled both academic and popular texts in the years leading up to and following World War I. The book shows the extent to which Benjamin participated in these debates by reconstructing the literal and figurative history of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century books that Benjamin analyzes and the literary, art historical and art theoretical, and political theological discussions of the Baroque with which he was familiar. In so doing, it challenges the exceptionalist, even hagiographic, approaches that have become common in Benjamin studies.
Aaron Jaffe
- Published in print:
- 2014
- Published Online:
- August 2015
- ISBN:
- 9780816692019
- eISBN:
- 9781452949017
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of Minnesota Press
- DOI:
- 10.5749/minnesota/9780816692019.003.0003
- Subject:
- Philosophy, General
Props are staged property: in them are revealed the preconditions of now dominant “patterns of production, consumption, and ownership.” This chapter cites Walter Benjamin’s recourse to props: literal ...
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Props are staged property: in them are revealed the preconditions of now dominant “patterns of production, consumption, and ownership.” This chapter cites Walter Benjamin’s recourse to props: literal props, particularly his discussion on staged objects in The Origin of German Tragic Drama; rhetorical props, the stakes of a certain rhetorical placement of the proper status of names against the proper status of things; and theoretical props, which refers to the dimensions of an expanded concept of props. It also cites Plato’s Cratylus in explaining the concept of Cratylism, which maintains the ideal of a fundamental fabrication of proper names and naming the properties of things accordingly.Less
Props are staged property: in them are revealed the preconditions of now dominant “patterns of production, consumption, and ownership.” This chapter cites Walter Benjamin’s recourse to props: literal props, particularly his discussion on staged objects in The Origin of German Tragic Drama; rhetorical props, the stakes of a certain rhetorical placement of the proper status of names against the proper status of things; and theoretical props, which refers to the dimensions of an expanded concept of props. It also cites Plato’s Cratylus in explaining the concept of Cratylism, which maintains the ideal of a fundamental fabrication of proper names and naming the properties of things accordingly.
Lucia Ruprecht
- Published in print:
- 2019
- Published Online:
- July 2019
- ISBN:
- 9780190659370
- eISBN:
- 9780190659417
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/oso/9780190659370.003.0005
- Subject:
- Music, Dance
This chapter addresses writings that range across Walter Benjamin’s œuvre to trace his engagements with gesturality beyond a directly Brechtian framework. In his 1934 essay “Franz Kafka. On the Tenth ...
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This chapter addresses writings that range across Walter Benjamin’s œuvre to trace his engagements with gesturality beyond a directly Brechtian framework. In his 1934 essay “Franz Kafka. On the Tenth Anniversary of His Death,” Benjamin argues that Kafka’s protagonists busy themselves with performing a lost or forgotten gestural script, so that their expressive corporeality remains unreadable. Gestural codes are deprived in the writings of Kafka of a commonly shared system of reference. But Kafka’s new, and, with Rilke, proliferating gestures, based as they are on an unexplainable yet unerring necessity, also exude an immanent grace: an inner logic that suggests a forward-looking directedness toward the as yet unknown. The chapter argues that this places them in the vicinity of the grace that Rivière finds in Nijinsky.Less
This chapter addresses writings that range across Walter Benjamin’s œuvre to trace his engagements with gesturality beyond a directly Brechtian framework. In his 1934 essay “Franz Kafka. On the Tenth Anniversary of His Death,” Benjamin argues that Kafka’s protagonists busy themselves with performing a lost or forgotten gestural script, so that their expressive corporeality remains unreadable. Gestural codes are deprived in the writings of Kafka of a commonly shared system of reference. But Kafka’s new, and, with Rilke, proliferating gestures, based as they are on an unexplainable yet unerring necessity, also exude an immanent grace: an inner logic that suggests a forward-looking directedness toward the as yet unknown. The chapter argues that this places them in the vicinity of the grace that Rivière finds in Nijinsky.
