Real Life or Spectacle? A Conflict in Eighteenth-Century German Drama

PMLA ◽  
1967 ◽  
Vol 82 (7) ◽  
pp. 485-497
Author(s):  
Robert R. Heitner

The closing episode of Der neue Menoza involves a lively argument between the representatives of two generations of Germans about the essential purpose of the theatrical experience. A bluff-mannered father, honest and hard-working—a prototype of the “people” in their relatively unspoiled state—likes to go to the puppet theater and laugh at Hanswurst. His educated, super-refined son scoffs at such crude entertainment: “Was die schöne Natur nicht nachahmt, Papa! Das kann unmöglich gefallen … was für Vergnügen können Sie an einer Vorstellung finden, in der nicht die geringste Illusion ist. … Es gibt gewisse Regeln für die Täuschung, das ist, für den sinnlichen Betrug, da ich glaube das wirklich zu sehen, was mir doch nur vorgestellt wird.” Disturbed in his healthy naïveté, the father agrees to test his beloved “Püppelspiel” by the new standards; but he returns home in a fury, roaring, “Du Hund! willst du ehrlichen Leuten ihr Pläsier verderben? Meinen ganzen Abend mir zu Gift gemacht … [sagst] mir von dreimaleins and schöne Natur, daß ich den ganzen Abend da gessessen bin wie ein Narr … gezählt und gerechnet und nach der Uhr gesehen; ich will dich lehren mir Regeln vorschreiben, wie ich mich amüsieren soll.”

2017 ◽  
Vol 13 (32) ◽  
pp. 65
Author(s):  
Eljvira Kica

Emma is a novel written by Jane Austen, which is based on real- life situations of the eighteenth century England. Austen depicts her novels to show clearly the customs and traditions that people had to use in order to get married; her dissatisfaction towards all these conditions; male dominance and also the consideration of women as weak human beings with limited rights. Based on all these issues, Austen chooses different kinds of marriages, mainly based on economical interest. Most of the people in her novels see the marriage as an obligation which had to be fulfilled; most of the girls got involved into a marriage market where parents decided what was good or bad for them. This paper describes the conditions of unmarried and married women Emma; the ways how the unmarried women chose the partners; the ways how Austen compared the conditions of women with the real life situations of the eighteenth century Britain; how she used irony to show her dissatisfaction towards the traditions of that time, and also the real message she conveys to the world.


Author(s):  
R. R. Palmer

This chapter considers the prevailing notion in the eighteenth century that nobility was a necessary bulwark of political freedom. Whether in the interest of a more open nobility or of a more closed and impenetrable nobility, the view was the same. Nobility as such, nobility as an institution, was necessary to the maintenance of a free constitution. There was also a general consensus that parliaments or ruling councils were autonomous, self-empowered, or empowered by history, heredity, social utility, or God; that they were in an important sense irresponsible, free to oppose the King (where there was one), and certainly owing no accounting to the “people.” The remainder of the chapter deals with the uses and abuses of social rank and the problems of administration, recruitment, taxation, and class consciousness.


2019 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 57
Author(s):  
Shalih Dzakiyyah Farda

This article discusses the issue of politics and hegemony in Harry Potter, a fantasy series by British author J. K. Rowling. The work is apparently coded with class systems and hierarchy in its society, and how it can be seen as a reflection of real-life society. It explores how the ruling group tries to keep the power only on the hands of the few by inserting their views and ideologies to their people, and thus resulting into a certain status quo that the ruling group finds desirable. The seven novels of Harry Potter are analysed through Marxist perspective using Antonio Gramsci’s theory of Cultural Hegemony, in which the people in power impose and spread their ideas to those below them as a way to control them. It is concluded that the series also involves criticisms on class domination, corruption on power, and rebellion.


2019 ◽  
Vol 2 (02) ◽  
pp. 43-53
Author(s):  
Iwan Muhammad Ridwan

The research entitled "Myths in the Si Kabayan Film Titled Didi Petet's Betting" aims to uncover a number of myths that actually occur in Sundanese society and analyze them about Roland Barthes's semiotic approach to the meaning of denotation and connotation. In the film Si Kabayan: Bet there are a number of myths which are a blend of myths that have lived in society and myths that were created by Si Kabayan's ingenuity. Si Kabayan's figure is always identified with the character of silly, lazy, but a lot of sense that can often defeat the antagonist he faces. Likewise, this film was produced in 1991. The Kabayan can fool the characters who become antagonists for himself with a number of myths he made. Even so, interpreting the myths that are found in the film Si Kabayan: Bets are needed interpretations from the people who live in Si Kabayan's living environment, because a number of these myths are mostly special myths that are rarely heard in real life. Some myths can also be broken by Si Kabayan himself.


2016 ◽  
Vol 2 (12) ◽  
Author(s):  
I Made Suarta

Local knowledge (local genius) is the quintessence of our ancestors thinking either oral or written traditions which we have received to date. Thought that, in the context of real archipelago has the same thread, which has a valuable values and universal to strengthen the integrity of the Unitary Republic of Indonesia. Through our founding genius thought that we should be able to implement it in real life to be able to reach people who "Gemah ripah loh jinawi", no less clothing, food, and shelter!Some of the many concepts of mind for the people of Bali are reflected in the work of puppeteer Ki Dalang Tangsub contributed to the development of Indonesia and has a universal value is the concept of maintaining the environment, save money, and humble. Through mental attitude has not always feel pretty; like not smart enough, not skilled enough, and not mature enough experience, make us always learn and practice. Learn and continue lifelong learning will make a man more mature and a lot of experience. Thus, the challenges in life will be easy to overcome. All that will be achieved, in addition to the hard work is also based on the mental attitude of inferiority is not proud, haughty, arrogant and other negative attitudes. Thought care environment, managing finances, and humble as described above, in Bali has been formulated through a literature shaped geguritan, namely Geguritan I Gedé Basur Dalang Tangsub works, one of the great authors in the early 19th century.  Keywords: Local knowledge, a cornerstone of, the character of the archipelago


2020 ◽  
Vol 59 (3) ◽  
pp. 495-520
Author(s):  
Padraic X. Scanlan

AbstractFrom the middle of the eighteenth century until the late 1830s, the idea of enslaved people as “peasants” was a commonplace among both antislavery and proslavery writers and activists in Britain. Slaveholders, faced with antislavery attacks, argued that the people they claimed to own were not an exploited labor force but a contented peasantry. Abolitionists expressed the hope that after emancipation, freedpeople would become peasants. Yet the “peasants” invoked in these debates were not smallholders or tenant farmers but plantation laborers, either held in bondage or paid low wages. British abolitionists promoted institutions and ideas invented by slaveholders to defend the plantation system. The idea of a servile and grateful “peasant” plantation labor force became, for British abolitionists, a justification for the “civilization” and subordination of freedpeople.


2013 ◽  
Vol 60 (1) ◽  
pp. 176-179
Author(s):  
Nigel Spivey

The front cover of John Bintliff's Complete Archaeology of Greece is interesting. There is the Parthenon: as most of its sculptures have gone, the aspect is post-Elgin. But it stands amid an assortment of post-classical buildings: one can see a small mosque within the cella, a large barrack-like building between the temple and the Erechtheum, and in the foreground an assortment of stone-built houses – so this probably pre-dates Greek independence and certainly pre-dates the nineteenth-century ‘cleansing’ of all Byzantine, Frankish, and Ottoman remains from the Athenian Akropolis (in fact the view, from Dodwell, is dated 1820). For the author, it is a poignant image. He is, overtly (or ‘passionately’ in today's parlance), a philhellene, but his Greece is not chauvinistically selective. He mourns the current neglect of an eighteenth-century Islamic school by the Tower of the Winds; and he gives two of his colour plates over to illustrations of Byzantine and Byzantine-Frankish ceramics. Anyone familiar with Bintliff's Boeotia project will recognize here an ideological commitment to the ‘Annales school’ of history, and a certain (rather wistful) respect for a subsistence economy that unites the inhabitants of Greece across many centuries. ‘Beyond the Akropolis’ was the war-cry of the landscape archaeologists whose investigations of long-term patterns of settlement and land use reclaimed ‘the people without history’ – and who sought to reform our fetish for the obvious glories of the classical past. This book is not so militant: there is due consideration of the meaning of the Parthenon Frieze, of the contents of the shaft graves at Mycenae, and suchlike. Its tone verges on the conversational (an attractive feature of the layout is the recurrent sub-heading ‘A Personal View’); nonetheless, it carries the authority and clarity of a textbook – a considerable achievement.


2000 ◽  
Vol 176 (1) ◽  
pp. 97-101 ◽  
Author(s):  
Scott Henderson

Humankind has been present on the Australian continent for at least 40 000, some say 60 000 years, remarkably adapted to the environment and having a cultural tradition appreciated by few Caucasians. White people have been here for only 200 years; and psychiatry for about half of that. We know nothing about the mental health of pre-contact indigenous peoples; but we now know a little about the ways in which mental disorders are explained and treated by traditional methods. In two centuries, the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islands communities, which are very diverse, have been steadily reduced to become only 1.5% of the population. From settlement in 1788 until the 1950s, most non-aboriginal Australians were of Anglo-Saxon or Celtic origin. Since the Second World War, the pattern of immigration has greatly enriched Australian life, first through large numbers of people from the Mediterranean littoral, Western Europe and the Balkans, and more recently from south-east Asia. Ethnic diversity is now evident in most peoples' daily lives – whom you see in the street, whom you work alongside, who your friends are, what you eat and who you have as patients. So the present Australian population of 18 million has undergone a marked change in demography and lifestyle within only two generations. Like the people, psychiatry is also changing rapidly. Where are the changes taking place? What is it like to be a psychiatrist here at present? Where has there been success and where has there been failure? Where is there lots of action?


Balcanica ◽  
2004 ◽  
pp. 159-169
Author(s):  
Tomislav Jovanovic

A rather small portion of old Slavonic literatures is thematically linked with the journey to the Holy Land. Of many Serbian pilgrims over the centuries only three left more detailed descriptions of Bulgarian places and parts: patriarch Arsenije III, Jerotej of Raca and Silvestar Popovic. They described, each in his own way, some of the places and areas along the road to Istanbul or Salonika. Their vivid depiction of encounters with people and observations about the places they saw on their way reveal only a fragment of life in the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Ottoman empire. In a seemingly ordinary way, they incorporate into their own epoch the legends heard from the people they met. The descriptions of Bulgarian parts in the Serbian accounts of pilgrimage have all the appeal that generally characterizes travel literature. Although their literary value is modest they belong among the works characterized by the simplicity and immediacy of experience. Rather than being the result of a strong literary ambition, they are witness to the need to speak about the great journey, quite an adventurous enterprise at the time.


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