Goethe's Faust and European Epic: Forgetting the FutureCamden House, 2007 - 276 sider A reassessment of genre that fills a major gap in Goethe's oeuvre and initiates a radically new reading of Faust. Goethe has long been enshrined as the greatest German poet, but his admirers have always been uneasy with the idea that he did not produce a great epic poem. A master in all the other genres and modes, it has been felt, should have done so. Arnd Bohm proposes that Goethe did compose an epic poem, which has been hidden in plain view: Faust. Goethe saw that the Faust legends provided the stuff for a national epic: a German hero, a villain (Mephistopheles), a quest (to know all things), a sublime conflict (good versus evil), a love story (via Helen of Troy), and elasticity (all human knowledge could be accommodated by the plot). Bohm reveals the care with which Goethe draws upon such sources as Tasso, Ariosto, Dante, and Vergil. In the microcosm of the "Auerbachs Keller" episode Faust has the opportunity to find "what holds the world together in its essence" and to end his quest happily, but he fails. He forgets the future because he cannot remember what epic teaches. His course ends tragically, bringing him back to the origin of epic, as he replicates the Trojans' mistake of presuming to cheat the gods. Arnd Bohm isAssociate Professor of English at Carleton University, Ottawa. |
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... authority would prove its undoing . By the end of the eighteenth century , the authority of epic in verse yielded to the pressure of prose from one side and of drama from the other . Hegel blamed the circumstances of world history for ...
... authority by cast- ing himself as their rightful heir.80 The problem was that Rome was not only the symbolic centre of a political domain ; it was also the seat of Papal authority , so that all claims for supremacy by the Holy Roman ...
... authority by submitting to the authority of Mephistopheles . He will become their " high priest , " the one whose deceptions replicate the abuses of power Luther had condemned when attacking the corrupt Papacy . Shortly after he arrives ...
Innhold
The System of European Epic | 20 |
Faust and Epic History | 36 |
The Roots of Evil | 87 |
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