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Elastizität

The Poetics of Space, Movement and Character in Frank Wedekind’s Theater

by Jennifer Ham (Author)
©2013 Monographs XIII, 214 Pages

Summary

Frequenting circuses in Paris and Berlin, Frank Wedekind, best known for Spring Awakening and the Lulu plays, learned that trapeze artists and tightrope walkers rely on different artificial reference points in space, in order to maintain their balance and orient themselves and to create their own sensorial and phenomenal worlds. This lesson in radical perspectivism and constructivism is a key to Wedekind’s practice as a playwright, and it links the Munich dramatist’s work to the thought of Schopenhauer, who first used the term Elastizität in a philosophical sense; Darwin, who considered adaptability to be a primordial characteristic of life; Nietzsche, whose commentary on acrobats in Also sprach Zarathustra announces the Overman; and Freud, who used the term to describe the reactive, conservative nature of the instincts. Taking Elastizität and the modern notion of adaptability as its point of departure, this book explores Wedekind’s construction of space, movement and character in his plays, pantomimes, ballets and theoretical writings as a means of understanding both the structural consistencies and the ideological incongruities that permeate his fiction and nearly all layers of his works. This work also disengages Wedekind from traditional discussions of the dramatist as controversial social critic and reintroduces him into more productive discussions of his connection to nineteenth-century philosophical debates surrounding determinism, dualism and perception, on the one hand, and modern notions of risk, danger and precarity on the other.

Details

Pages
XIII, 214
Year
2013
ISBN (PDF)
9781453909829
ISBN (Hardcover)
9780820430836
DOI
10.3726/978-1-4539-0982-9
Language
English
Publication date
2012 (October)
Keywords
Frank Wedekind spring awakening controversial social critic
Published
New York, Bern, Berlin, Bruxelles, Frankfurt am Main, Oxford, Wien, 2012. 228 pp.

Biographical notes

Jennifer Ham (Author)

Jennifer Ham is Associate Professor of German and Humanistic Studies and has served as Chair of the Department of Modern Languages at the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay, where she received the Founder’s Award for Excellence in Teaching and offers a wide array of courses on German literature, culture and language. Ham has presented and published on topics, such as, turn-of-the-century schooling, Frank Wedekind, animal studies, Nietzsche and femininity, cabaret and German cinema. She is also co-editor of Animal Acts: Configuring the Human in Western History.

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Title: Elastizität
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230 pages