German Tragic Drama Research Articles

Discursive Form versus the Past in Literary History

A ENERATION of younger scholars in the United States is returning to literary history. They are reconsidering its theory, and, as they write it, they are arguing for and providing new models of what it should be, and thus they are responding anew to the imperative, voiced at the very start of modern literary history by the Schlegel brothers, that history and theory should be one. I have followed these developments with the keenest interest and sympathy, and yet, having tried to write literary history, I am unconvinced that it can be done. Hence I raise again, with reference to both the new and the traditional literary history, the very old question, Is it possible to write literary history?' Literary history is usually considered to be a mode of criticism, but it is also a mode of history. As such, its intention is to represent and organize the past of literature and to explain why the literary series developed as it did. The genre of literary history, we might remind ourselves, includes not only works on national and regional literatures, but also on particular periods, styles, themes, and forms, and on the literature of races, of women, and of political and social groups, such as classes and religions. Thus Walter Benjamin's The Origin of German Tragic Drama, F. O. Matthiessen's American Renaissance, Mario Praz's The Romantic Agony, Louis O. Martz's The Poetry of Meditation, Elaine Showalter's A Literature of Their Own, and Henry Nash Smith's Virgin Land are all literary history. Literary history has a long history of its own that has not yet been told, but in this essay I ignore the changes that have taken place in the genre, and draw on examples from any time in the last two centuries. My hope is to observe major forms of literary history that have persisted, essentially unchanged, from the nineteenth century to now, and to assess their strengths and limitations. Whatever leads us to believe that we cannot know the past, or cannot represent it without also distorting it, tends to undermine our faith in literary history. To traditional reasons for skepticism, familiar from the nineteenth century-the likelihood of bias in

Allegory vs Allegory: The divorce of different modes of allegorical perception in Coetzee'sWaiting for the Barbarians.

Summary In this paper the allegorical mode of Coetzee's novels is situated in the context of contemporary constructions of allegory. This is done by tracing the points of intersection between Waiting for the Barbarians and those theories of allegory produced by contemporary readings of Walter Benjamin's The Origin of German Tragic Drama, by Paul de Man in “The Rhetoric of Temporality”, and by Lacanian psychoanalytic theory. It is suggested that allegory constitutes a paradigm for interpretive practice, and that in Waiting for the Barbarians a “Benjaminian” mode of allegorical perception acts as a corrective to an “Hegelian” mode of allegorical perception, which tends to offer definitive meanings and to posit a relatively stable connection between the allegorical signifier and extra‐textual reality.

Lukacs and Benjamin: Parallels and Contrasts

It is not sufficiently known to what extent Georg Lukics, the author of The Theory of the Novel and The Metaphysics of Tragedy, stood guard, in a manner of speaking, over the conception of Benjamin's classic text, the title of which is incorrectly translated as Origin of the German Tragic Drama. Even the best monograph on Benjamin by Richard Wolin' speaks of this influence in general and vague terms. In fact, The Theory of the Novel, a book Benjamin knew well and held in great respect, served as encouragement and methodological support for him to write the

Comedia and Trauerspiel: On Benjamin and Calderón

COMPAEATIYE drama 1 Volume 16 Spring 1982 Number 1 Comedia and Trauerspiel: On Benjamin and Calderon Anthony J. Cascardi Nowhere but in Calderon could the perfect baroque Trauerspiel be studied. Walter Benjamin Walter Benjamin’s Ursprung des Deutschen Trauerspiels (The Origin of German Tragic Drama) is a dense and difficult book. “Conceived,” as its dedication evasively states, in 1916, written in 1925, and published three years later, the work is the single full-length book by a critic whom Frank Kermode could hail as “matchless in intuitive power.”l Benjamin specialized in aphorisms, essays, and, as one translated collection calls itself, “reflections.” These are widely known to a broad segment of readers. His essays on Proust and Baudelaire are masterpieces of lyrical prose; his study of Karl Kraus is a trenchant analysis of modem narrative. His essays on photography, as all his work, are marked by a deep vein of philosophic concern. Indeed, none was as philosophical as the Ursprung, a book Benjamin sub­ mitted as his University Habilitationsschrift, the rough equivalent ANTHONY J. CASCARDI is Assistant Professor of Spanish and Comparative Literature at the University of California, Berkeley. 1 2 Comparative Drama of a dissertation. Rejected by various departments as inappro­ priate or incomprehensible, the text remains among the lesserknown of Benjamin’s writings. On the one hand, it deals with relatively arcane materials, with the Trauerspiel (the term is significant) of the German Baroque—the work of Gryphius, Opitz, Sigmund von Birken—with late seventeenth-century collections of heraldic emblems, with occultist tracts and odd word lists; on the other, it is grounded in a philosophy strongly flavored by German Romanticism (there are major debts to Schopenhauer, Novalis, Nietzsche), yet directly anticipating the dialectical materialism of the so-called Frankfurt School to which Benjamin would later be tangentially related. It was, in fact, the opening section of the Ursprung that proved seminal in the development of Theodor Adorno’s thought. Walter Benjamin is also a thinker in a long line of Germans with a profound admiration for and interest in the Spanish comedia. On these grounds, Benjamin warrants comparison to Schlegel, Goethe, and Tieck. The Ursprung is to be sure not the only text in which he trained his powers of thought on the Spanish Baroque theatre. The essay “ ‘El mayor monstruo, los celos’ von Calderón und ‘Herodes und Mariamne’ von Hebbel” is a characteristic investigation of what Benjamin called the “melodrama of fate,” the Schicksalsdrama. As in the Trauerspiel book, Benjamin focuses intensely on the privileged function of objects and on the workings of fate in the Herod plays. Through­ out his work, he finds that the German plays are particularly poignant, but circumscribed in their range of sadness and melancholia. In comparison, the Spanish court and martyr plays of Lope, Tirso, and Calderón are superior in sheer poetic effect, in delicacy of motive, in intricacy of execution. Stylistic features like these are worth noting because Benjamin is a staunchly aesthetic thinker; convinced that there is a significance to the inner hollowness of the Baroque world, he turns consistently to what seem superficial aspects of style. But in addition, Ben­ jamin’s own style is of a density and syntactic weld that could only be matched by the supremely ordered verse of a Calderón. In Susan Sontag’s words, Benjamin’s style of thinking and writing is like “freeze-frame baroque. . . . It was as if each sentence had to say everything, before the inward gaze of total concentration dissolved the subject before his eyes.”2 Why the concern with Trauerspiel and not tragedy? The Anthony J. Cascardi 3 distinction is crucial to an understanding of whatever special variations on the tragic pattern of feeling that the Spanish comedia and late Renaissance and Baroque drama may, on the whole, contain. The first distinctions are categorical. Tragedy deals with myth. Its metaphysical foundation is that of ritualistic and heroic sacrifice. It is transcendental in thrust. Not so the Trauerspiel. As its name signifies, the Trauerspiel opens onto a realm of sadness and mourning rather than to the devastating wretchedness of painful destruction felt in ancient tragedy. Its action works in and through history, not myth (“The...

Walter Benjamin's Theory of Allegory

As early as 1923 Walter Benjamin announced his intention of working out a of allegory.' The first stage of this intention was realized as his most complete single study, the book on Baroque Trauerspiel (now translated in English as The Origin of German Tragic Drama). First published in 1927, the work that ironically closed all doors to academic respectability for him was completed before the first of his rapprochements with Marxism in the mid-1920s. Critics and historians have justifiably emphasized the different phases of Benjamin's intellectual life, but what impresses one about his writings on allegory is the essential consistency of their direction throughout his career. Baudelaire, the one writer to whom he devoted most of his mature study, is for Benjamin the inheritor of the Trauerspiel; from an early indication that Baudelaire's which is fed on melancholy, is an allegorical genius, Benjamin maintained and deepended his sense of allegory as he transferred its focus from the 17th to the 19th century.2 Unable to complete his projected book on Baudelaire, one of whose three sections was to be Baudelaire as Allegorist, he left only the fragmentary collection of notes, itself allegorically titled Central Park, that form his last reflections on any literary subject. More than half of its forty-five fragments are concerned with allegory, ostensibly on Baudelaire, but many of them explicitly relating and contrasting Baudelairean allegory to Baroque allegory. In these notes, written during the last year of his life, he refers more than once to his Baroque-book, noting down points of consonance or contrast with the arguments developed there (GS, I, 2, pp. 659, 690). Almost every study of Benjamin's thought mentions allegory at some point; surprisingly, however, the theory in its entirety, as elusive and unconventional by scholarly standards as it is, has gone virtually without

The Origin of German Tragic Drama

The Origin of German Tragic Drama

The Origin of German Tragic Drama

Walter Benjamin is widely acknowledged as amongst the greatest literary critics of this century, and The Origin of German Tragic Drama is his most sustained and original work. Indeed, Georg Lukacs - one of the most trenchant opponents of Benjamin's aesthetics - singled out this work as one of the main sources of literary modernism in the twentieth century. The Origin of German Tragic Drama 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 the royal martyr dramas called Trauerspiel. Benjamin also comments on the engravings of Durer, and the theatre of Shakespeare and Calderon. Baroque tragedy, he argues, was distinguished from classical tragedy by its shift from myth into history. The characteristic atmosphere of the Trauerspiel was consequently 'melancholy'. The emblems of baroque allegory point to the extinct values of a classical world that they can never attain or repeat. Their suggestive power, however, remains to haunt subsequent cultures, down to this century.