Making a Whore of Freedom: Büchner's Marion Episode
No moment in Georg Büchner's drama has been assigned more significance as a marker of his radical modernity than the "Marion episode." Apparently unprecedented in form and content, this brief, enigmatic exchange between a prostitute and the protagonist of Dantons Tod [Danton's Death] is taken as the archetype of Büchner's jagged, proto-montage aesthetic, as the first example of his proto-psychological focus on the close rendering of sensation, and as the foundational statement of what is taken to be his proto-nihilist repudiation of history. This essay suggests that such impressions are mistaken. It reveals the Marion episode to be a tightly constructed allegory of French Revolutionary history, and one that takes as its precedent and pretence the most widely known work of pre-Revolutionary pornography in Europe, the once-forbidden Thérèse philosophe [Thérèse the Philosopher]. Linking the pornographic to the political, mirroring each in the other, the Marion episode, it suggests, does not use eroticism to break with history so much as to illuminate it, figuring the Revolution as a process shaped and driven by a libertine structure of desire that its violence exhausts and destroys. Rather than marking out Büchner as a proleptic modernist, the "Marion episode," it concludes, places him firmly, with Baudelaire, in second-generation modernity, registering the emergence of the modern from the destructive violence of the past.
The Persistence of Allegory: Drama and Neoclassicism from Shakespeare to Wagner
Preface 1. Introduction 2. Claude's Allegories and Literary Neoclassicism 3. Secular Tragedy: Neoclassicism in the Sixteenth Century 4. Allegory and Passion: Latin Dramatic Forms in the Seventeenth Century 5. The Allegorical Idioms of the Illusionist Stage: Spectacle in the Seventeenth Century 6. Opera and Dance: The Revival of Greek Tragedy 7. The Greek Revival: German Classicism and the Recovery of Spoken Drama 8. Wagner and the Death of Gesamtkunstwerk Coda: "This insubstantial pageant" Notes Works Cited Index
Citizens: A Chronicle of the French Revolution
Part One: Alterations - the France of Louis XVI: new men blue horizons, red ink absolutism attacked the cultural construction of a citizen the costs of modernity. Part 2 Expectations: body politics suicides, 1787-1788 grievances, Autumn 1788-Spring 1789 improvising a nation Bastille, July 1789. Part 3 Choices: reason and unreason, July - November 1789 acts of faith, October 1789-July 1790 departures, August 1790 - July 1791 "Marseillaise", September 1791-August 1792 impure blood, August 1792-January 1793. Part 4 Virtue and death: enemies of the people? Winter-Spring 1793 "Terror is the order of the day" the politics of turpitude Chiliasm, April-July 1794.