The writer, scientist, philosopher, and radical democrat Georg Büchner (1813-1837) occupies a unique place in the cultural legacy of the German-speaking countries. Born into an epoch of inevitable, ...yet arrested historical transition, Büchner produced a small but exceptionally rich body of work. This collection of essays in English and in German considers the full spectrum of his writings, the political pamphlet Der Hessische Landbote, the dramas Danton's Tod, Leonce und Lena, Woyzeck, and the fragmentary narrative Lenz, as well as the letters, the philosophical lectures on Descartes and Spinoza, and the scientific texts. The essays examine connections between these works, study texts in detail, debate ways of editing them, and trace their reception in contemporary literature and film. The novel readings presented here not only celebrate Büchner on the eve of his bicentenary birthday but also insert this untimely figure into discussions of the revolution-restoration dynamic and realism in poetics and politics.
Georg Büchner Gillett, Robert; Schonfield, Ernest; Steuer, Daniel
2017, Letnik:
89
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This book examines the continuing relevance of Büchner in the early twenty-first century, in terms of politics, science, philosophy, aesthetics, performance and cultural studies, uniquely combining ...close readings with wide-ranging cultural, theatrical, philosophical and theoretical contextualizations. Der Band beschäftigt sich mit Büchners anhaltender Aktualität in den verschiedensten Bereichen. Er zeichnet sich durch detailliert textbezogene Interpretationen aus, die gleichzeitig zahlreiche aktuelle kultur- und theaterwissenschaftliche, philosophische, naturwissenschaftliche, ästhetische und theoretische Themen ansprechen.
Since the beginning of reception, Büchner's epoch-making narrative Lenz was praised for its iconic quality, for the suggestive verbal mediacy of visual experience and the evocation of mental ...pictures. But so far research has paid no attention to the fact that this specific interrelation of language and image also strongly influenced the reception of the narrative in the fine arts. For the first time, this study analyses the complex relations between text and image in Lenz and its reception comprehensively, i.e. in consideration of the trias of literary communication: author, work and (artistic) reader. Firstly it is shown how the text-image-relations form the aesthetic fundament of the narrative as means of composition, but also as thematic, metareflexive element. Subsequently the different forms of imagery are analysed, which are generated in this way. The final part of the study presents illustrations based on Lenz and confronts them with the text. More than 700 pictures from 47 artists could be found, e.g. the expressive self-portraits of Walter Gramatté, Toyen's surrealistic compositions, the 'degenerative' etchings of Susanne Theumer or Thomas Kohl's landscape-representations.
In the critical literature on Georg Büchner this monograph represents the first organic work devoted to the subject of the body – a pivotal issue for an understanding of his writings. The book ...investigates the significance assumed by the human body in three spheres of analysis: the political, the erotic and the scientific-philosophical. In the latter area the analysis hinges on the relations between Büchner's work and the writings of the three principal French materialist philosophers of the eighteenth century: La Mettrie, d'Holbach and Helvétius. The appraisal of this relation illustrates not only Büchner's appropriation of the legacy of ideas of French materialism, but also moments in which he satirises, sarcastically criticises or outrightly rejects certain central aspects of this vision of man and nature. From this analysis and the study of the political significance of the body and the erotic aspect, it emerges that the body, understood as Leib – human body, lived and living, the hub of subjective perception and experience – not only has a crucial function in the figurative layout of the literary works, but is also the focal point of Büchner's view of man, thus assuming a central importance both in the three areas examined and in the more strictly aesthetic sphere.
This book won the Premio Associazione Sigismondo Malatesta "Opera Critica" - Letteratura, Teatro e Arti dello spettacolo - Edizione 2009.
This article juxtaposes two aspects of the career of Karl-Emil Franzos (1848–1904): his editorship of Georg Büchner's dramatic fragment Woyzeck, which Franzos misread as Wozzeck, thereby bestowing ...the “incorrect” name on Alban Berg's 1925 opera; and his work as a leading German-language chronicler of Jewish life in late nineteenth-century Galicia and Bukovina. It is apparent in Franzos's fiction that his sense of melodrama informed his editorial decisions in shaping Büchner's manuscript. His misreading of Woyzeck as Wozzeck, by the same token, suggests both the linguistic and the perceptual limitations of describing eastern European ethnic groups from the perspective of the imperial (German) language. Franzos's approach to the fragmentation, alternately, of Büchner's manuscript and of the disintegrating Habsburg Empire anticipates the theoretical insights of Walter Benjamin and Theodor Adorno around the concept of the Trauerspiel (play of mourning) with which this discussion opens.
