A doctor's choice De Ambrogi, Marco
The Lancet (British edition),
09/2019, Volume:
394, Issue:
10202
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Manuel Harlan While Schnitzler focused on the struggle between medicine and religion and the creeping antisemitism in Viennese society, Icke broadens the narrative to encompass gender, race, ...sexuality, and class, thus giving the play a complexity in line with modern times. ...Icke plays with the unconscious bias of the audience by casting women to play men and revealing the gender, religion, and ethnicity of characters only later in the play. While Wolff defines herself foremost as a doctor, she is violently attacked for being Jewish, white, a woman, a supporter of the right to abortion, and an educated person, depending on how convenient the defining characteristics are to support the argument of her critics. ...the play makes clear how in our society identities can become weaponised and pitted against each other. The Doctor is a powerful reflection on our outrage culture that goes beyond the original conflict between medicine and faith to question the limits of political correctness and the dangers of social media witch-hunts.
Der Ehrentag Fliedl, Konstanze; Polt-Heinzl, Evelyne
2017, 2017-04-24, 20170424
eBook
Vom Werk Arthur Schnitzlers existiert bislang keine kritische Ausgabe. Die Bände bieten das Faksimile des Manuskripts, eine präzise Transkription und einen Lesetext. Der Text wird erschlossen durch ...editorische Apparate, einen literaturwissenschaftlichen Kommentar sowie einen ausführlichen Editionsbericht. Die Ausgabe erlaubt damit erstmals Einblicke in die Werkgenese.
This paper connects the category of the grotesque to the political and aesthetic complications of representations of post-monarchical power. In order to achieve the interplay of this figurative ...development, two grotesque plays on the French Revolution will be examined: Arthur Schnitzler's Der grüne Kakadu (1899) and Rudolf von Delius' Robespierre ( 1906 ). The analysis will show how Schnitzler and Delius deconstruct the theatrical procedures that underpin socio-political structures challenged by the French Revolution. What this amounts to is the grotesque staging of revolutionary beginning (Schnitzler) or end (Delius) and revealing the repressed origins and foundations witnessed at the advent of political modernity. Both authors hint at the impossibility of suppressing the instinctive, Dionysian dimension (mostly associated with the masses) in favour of rational, Apollonian individuality. Doing so, Schnitzler as Delius engage with dominant contemporary views on political representation, authoritarianism and mass psychology.
...I aim to show that by giving a reading of Schnitzler's writings in the light of the "Uncanny" it is possible to frame a more robust theory of the "Uncanny" than that originally proposed by Freud, ...one which takes Kleinian aggression into account. Certain of Schnitzler's short stories and novellas in particular, "Flowers" (1894), "The Murderer" (1910), Dying (1892), Dead Men Tell No Tales (1897), Dream Story (1926), even his novel The Road to the Open (1908) - these prose works are peopled by dead bodies, by characters who already seem to half-inhabit a penumbral, shadowy world in which death beckons. ...characters seem almost by definition to be potentially suicidal from the outset, either consciously or unconsciously. ...what is most striking of all is the extent to which characters are, quite literally, haunted by ghostly characters or images of ghostliness which taint and poison their existence with phantasies of death to the point where these characters are very nearly precipitated to their real or phantasied deaths too.3 These ghostly characters seem almost to lean back into life in order to snatch the living characters down into the abyss of death with them and death is presented as very seductive. ...just as a painter poses a living woman for Venus or The Virgin, although in his mind' s-eye he reconstructs some ideal image from his past, so Poe, when in his tales he paints his dying Virginia's poses, always reproduces the great mother's image that gleams through.7 For Bonaparte, therefore, stories such as "The Oval Portrait" and "Ligeia", and poems such as "Annabel Lee", all give expression to Poe's unresolved Oedipus complex, his unconscious longing for union with the dead mother. In my analysis of Schnitzler in the light of the "Uncanny", therefore, I will highlight three recurring strands, which are all inextricably intertwined: aggression, the fusion of the erotic and death, and the "uncanny" body.
Arthur Schnitzler's drama Reigen is primarily known for its explicit content and the scandals it produced. Yet Reigen also reads as an attempt to modernize, and localize, the classical form of the ...chorus which had not found a place in modern bourgeois theater. Curiously overlooked in studies on literary choruses, the play—its title being one of the possible translations of the Greek χoϱός (choros)—can in fact be resituated as χoϱός‐literature, as choreo‐graphy, as literal transposition of a dance into a series of dialogues. The stringency of its serial format, the attention it gives to movement and location, entering and exiting, up to its suspension of language for the sake of rhythmical notation (– – –) reveal Reigen as theatrical hybrid: as chorus bursting with its copulating individuals. Radically questioning the conventions of “domestic” theater, Schnitzler's Reigen brings to the stage a critique of theatrical genres and conventions that, by the end of the nineteenth century, had clearly outgrown their use.
Often categorized as an experimental or case novella, Arthur Schnitzler's early novella Sterben develops a literary approach that reflects the cultural framework of statistics. At the time, the ...statistical method aspired to relate individual life to statistical data, a development to which Schnitzler was especially sensitive as a physician. Writing medical texts and editing a medical journal, Schnitzler recognized in which ways the advance of statistics was furthered through visualization, for which Francis Galton's composite portraiture is an example. The growing impact of the statistical method furthered the problematic role of the individual in statistical data. Sterben lays out the challenges the individual faces with regard to the positivist development of the statistical approach, describing the fate of a fatally ill tuberculosis patient. Working through the cultural notions of "consumption," the novella lays out how especially Romantic notions of disease have become vain retrospectives, as death is increasingly represented by statistical data. Schnitzler's text drafts a literary perspective of the impact of statistics on the individual, with consideration to the question of literary form.
This essay examines narratives in which Arthur Schnitzler explores the unconscious of Vienna's fin‐de‐siècle society through the leitmotif of the haunted letter. Examining five short stories written ...between 1880 and 1930, the essay argues that letters written by characters who anticipate their readership after their deaths reflect the uncanny paranoia and hysteria of modernity. Through an analysis of Schnitzler's narrative techniques, the essay investigates the author's psychological portrayal of modern society with the literary tool of the death letter, highlighting modernist instability and uncertainty, especially that of the bourgeois man. This essay argues that Schnitzler makes his critique of anxiety increasingly explicit over time in his published writings, showing one's social acceptance to be a catalyst for violence towards the self and others, while also continuing to problematize Viennese masculinity in his unpublished writings.
The protagonist of Arthur Schnitzler's play Professor Bernhardi (1912) falls victim to an anti-Semitic smear campaign that costs him his career. Bernhardi's unwavering adherence to his ethical ...principles and the triumph of his opportunistic detractors has been linked to the crisis of liberalism in Austria at the end of the nineteenth century. This article reads Bernhardi's individual ethics in the context of contemporary discourses on the relationship of the individual and society that surfaced in response to the increasing anti-Semitism in Europe such as Émile Durkheim's defense of individualism in "Individualism and the Intellectuals" (1898) and Werner Sombart's discussion of Jewish contribution to society in Die Juden und das Wirtschaftsleben (1911). It argues that Bernhardi's insistence on moral individualism should not be read as Schnitzler's mourning of a failed political ideal but as his reclaiming of the values of Enlightenment for Jewish identity.
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