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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... characters , into the staging , and above all into the plot itself , for on the stage no narrator attempts to ... character , there is another odd assumption prevalent in Goethe studies . This is the division of his career into a “ non ...
... characters , one of few critics to do so on the basis of their actions.33 There are exactly four characters , each of whom represents a unique temperament.34 Goethe has constructed for each of the four a character corresponding to the ...
... characters accord- ingly . Even characters produced by writers who did not think in such cate- gories can be retroactively subsumed by this system , so that one gets psychoanalytic readings of Hamlet or Milton's Satan . Finally , we ...
Innhold
The System of European Epic | 20 |
Faust and Epic History | 36 |
The Roots of Evil | 87 |
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