Search results for ""Author Mary Ann Frese Witt""

Metatheater and Modernity: Baroque and Neobaroque is the first work to link the study of metatheater with the concepts of baroque and neobaroque. Arguing that the onset of European modernity in the early seventeenth century and both the modernist and the postmodernist periods of the twentieth century witnessed a flourishing of the phenomenon of theater that reflects on itself as theater, the author reexamines the concepts of metatheater, baroque, and neobaroque through a pairing and close analysis of seventeenth and twentieth century plays. The comparisons include Jean Rotrou’s The True Saint Genesius with Jean-Paul Sartre’s Kean and Jean Genet’s The Blacks; Pierre Corneille’s L’Illusion comique with Tony Kushner’s The Illusion; Gian Lorenzo Bernini’s The Impresario with Luigi Pirandello’s theater-in-theater trilogy; Shakespeare’s Hamlet with Pirandello’s Henry IV and Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead; Molière’s Impromptu de Versailles with “impromptus” by Jean Cocteau, Jean Giraudoux, and Eugène Ionesco. Metatheater and Modernity also examines the role of technology in the creating and breaking of illusions in both centuries. In contrast to previous work on metatheater, it emphasizes the metatheatrical role of comedy. Metatheater, the author concludes, is both performance and performative: it accomplishes a perceptual transformation in its audience both by defending theater and exposing the illusory quality of the world outside.

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This book addresses the question of the legacies of Nietzsche's theories of tragedy as literary genre and of the tragic as ontological concept. Although The Birth of Tragedy was the most seminal in this sense, Nietzsche's followers also read, misread, and appropriated ideas on the tragic in his later works. Taking seriously the call for the rebirth of the tragic spirit in culture generally, dramatists, poets, novelists, philosophers, film makers, and theorists not always acknowledging a debt to Nietzsche incorporated the Dionysian and the Apollinian, as well as other aspects of Nietzsche's thinking on tragedy, into their own works. This volume gives a sampling of the multifaceted and widespread impact of this aspect of Nietzsche's thought in Eastern as well as in Western Europe and in the United States.

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