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133-514: Médée is a dramatic tragedy in five acts written in alexandrine verse by Pierre Corneille , first performed in 1635 at the Théâtre du Marais . Corneille was inspired by both the Seneca and Euripedes tellings. The heroine of the play is the sorceress Médée . After Médée gives Jason twin boys, Jason leaves her for Creusa . Médée exacts her revenge on her husband by burning his new spouse and slitting

266-401: A character flaw , or as a mistake (since the original Greek etymology traces back to hamartanein , a sporting term that refers to an archer or spear -thrower missing his target). According to Aristotle, "The misfortune is brought about not by [general] vice or depravity, but by some [particular] error or frailty." The reversal is the inevitable but unforeseen result of some action taken by

399-407: A "pain [that] awakens pleasure,” for the audience. While many cultures have developed forms that provoke this paradoxical response, the term tragedy often refers to a specific tradition of drama that has played a unique and important role historically in the self-definition of Western civilization . That tradition has been multiple and discontinuous, yet the term has often been used to invoke

532-534: A British mandate; despite repeated invitations, he failed to persuade Benjamin (and family) to leave the continent for the Middle East. In 1924 Hugo von Hofmannsthal , in the Neue Deutsche Beiträge magazine, published Benjamin's "Goethes Wahlverwandtschaften" (" Goethe 's Elective Affinities "), about Goethe's third novel, Die Wahlverwandtschaften (1809). According to literary critic Burkhardt Lindner,

665-451: A Dream , The Handmaid's Tale . Defining tragedy is no simple matter, and there are many definitions, some of which are incompatible with each other. Oscar Mandel, in A Definition of Tragedy (1961), contrasted two essentially different means of arriving at a definition. First is what he calls the derivative way, in which the tragedy is thought to be an expression of an ordering of the world; "instead of asking what tragedy expresses,

798-452: A commitment to the furtherance of European culture. He wrote: "My life experience led me to this insight: the Jews represent an elite in the ranks of the spiritually active ... For Judaism is to me in no sense an end in itself, but the most distinguished bearer and representative of the spiritual." This was a position Benjamin largely held lifelong. It was as a speaker and debater in the milieu of

931-492: A concept that identifies the subject's ability to identify desire in visual objects. This also leads to the ability to perceive information by habit instead of rapt attention. Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels ( The Origin of German Tragic Drama , 1928), is a critical study of German baroque drama, as well as the political and cultural climate of Germany during the Counter-Reformation (1545–1648). Benjamin presented

1064-580: A cousin, Günther Anders , a German philosopher and anti-nuclear activist who studied under Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger . Through his mother, Walter's great-uncle was the classical archaeologist Gustav Hirschfeld . In 1902, ten-year-old Walter was enrolled at the Kaiser Friedrich School in Charlottenburg ; he completed his secondary school studies ten years later. In his youth, Walter

1197-482: A critic included essays on Baudelaire , Goethe , Kafka , Kraus , Leskov , Proust , Walser , Trauerspiel and translation theory . He also made major translations into German of the Tableaux Parisiens section of Baudelaire's Les Fleurs du mal and parts of Proust's À la recherche du temps perdu . Of the hidden principle organizing Walter Benjamin's thought Scholem wrote unequivocally that "Benjamin

1330-501: A day before the Germans entered the capital with orders to arrest him at his flat. In August, he obtained a travel visa to the U.S. that Horkheimer had negotiated for him. In eluding the Gestapo , Benjamin planned to travel to the U.S. from neutral Portugal, which he expected to reach via Francoist Spain , then ostensibly a neutral country. The historical record indicates that he safely crossed

1463-405: A deed that is important and complete, and of [a certain] magnitude, by means of language enriched [with ornaments], each used separately in the different parts [of the play]: it is enacted, not [merely] recited, and through pity and fear it effects relief ( catharsis ) to such [and similar] emotions. There is some dissent to the dithyrambic origins of tragedy, mostly based on the differences between

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1596-559: A form that developed in 18th-century Europe. It was a fruit of the Enlightenment and the emergence of the bourgeois class and its ideals. It is characterised by the fact that its protagonists are ordinary citizens. The first true bourgeois tragedy was an English play, George Lillo 's The London Merchant; or, the History of George Barnwell , which was first performed in 1731. Usually, Gotthold Ephraim Lessing 's play Miss Sara Sampson , which

1729-403: A jumble of sixty apparently autonomous short prose pieces: aphorisms, jokes, dream protocols, cityscapes, landscapes, and mindscapes; portions of writing manuals, trenchant contemporary political analysis; prescient appreciations of the child's psychology, behavior, and moods; decodings of bourgeois fashion, living arrangements and courtship patterns; and time and again, remarkable penetrations into

1862-527: A powerful effect of cultural identity and historical continuity—"the Greeks and the Elizabethans , in one cultural form; Hellenes and Christians, in a common activity," as Raymond Williams puts it. From its origins in the theatre of ancient Greece 2500 years ago, from which there survives only a fraction of the work of Aeschylus , Sophocles and Euripides , as well as many fragments from other poets, and

1995-504: A professional critic and occasional translator. Working with Franz Hessel he translated the first volumes of Marcel Proust 's À la Recherche du Temps Perdu ( In Search of Lost Time ). The next year, 1926, he began writing for the German newspapers Frankfurter Zeitung and Die Literarische Welt (The Literary World); that paid enough for him to reside in Paris for some months. In December 1926,

2128-625: A small part of the text prepared by Benjamin was included in the encyclopedia. During Benjamin's lifetime, the article was not published in its entirety. A Russian translation of the article was published in the Russian edition of "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" in 1996. In 1927, he began Das Passagen-Werk ( The Arcades Project ), his uncompleted magnum opus , a study of 19th-century Parisian life. The same year, he saw Scholem in Berlin, for

2261-465: A successor of the ancient dramatists. For much of the 17th century, Pierre Corneille , who made his mark on the world of tragedy with plays like Medée (1635) and Le Cid (1636), was the most successful writer of French tragedies. Corneille's tragedies were strangely un-tragic (his first version of Le Cid was even listed as a tragicomedy), for they had happy endings. In his theoretical works on theatre, Corneille redefined both comedy and tragedy around

2394-559: A tenured university professor in Germany. At Bloch's suggestion, he read Lukács's History and Class Consciousness (1923). He also met the Latvian Bolshevik and actress Asja Lācis , then residing in Moscow; he became her lover and she was a lasting intellectual influence on him. A year later, in 1925, Benjamin withdrew The Origin of German Tragic Drama as his possible qualification for

2527-409: A tight set of passionate and duty-bound conflicts between a small group of noble characters, and concentrated on these characters' double-binds and the geometry of their unfulfilled desires and hatreds. Racine's poetic skill was in the representation of pathos and amorous passion (like Phèdre 's love for her stepson) and his impact was such that emotional crisis would be the dominant mode of tragedy to

2660-441: A time when a goat was either the prize in a competition of choral dancing or was what a chorus danced around prior to the animal's ritual sacrifice . In another view on the etymology, Athenaeus of Naucratis (2nd–3rd century CE) says that the original form of the word was trygodia from trygos (grape harvest) and ode (song), because those events were first introduced during grape harvest. Writing in 335 BCE (long after

2793-476: A trend of episodic behavior that was to remain true throughout his life, Benjamin was a maven within an important community during a critically important historical period: the left- intelligentsia of interwar Berlin and Paris . Acquaintance with Walter Benjamin was a connecting thread for a variety of major figures in metaphysics, philosophy, theology, the visual arts, theater, literature, radio, politics and various other domains. Benjamin happened to be present on

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2926-484: Is abundant evidence for tragoidia understood as "song for the prize goat". The best-known evidence is Horace, Ars poetica 220-24 ("he who with a tragic song competed for a mere goat"); the earliest is the Parian Marble, a chronicle inscribed about 264/63 BCE, which records, under a date between 538 and 528 BCE: "Thespis is the poet ... first produced ... and as prize was established the billy goat" (FrGHist 239A, epoch 43);

3059-531: Is characterised by seriousness and involves a great person who experiences a reversal of fortune ( Peripeteia ). Aristotle's definition can include a change of fortune from bad to good as in the Eumenides , but he says that the change from good to bad as in Oedipus Rex is preferable because this induces pity and fear within the spectators. Tragedy results in a catharsis (emotional cleansing) or healing for

3192-518: Is doubly unique among the extant ancient dramas. Athenian tragedies were performed in late March/early April at an annual state religious festival in honor of Dionysus. The presentations took the form of a contest between three playwrights, who presented their works on three successive days. Each playwright offered a tetralogy consisting of three tragedies and a concluding comic piece called a satyr play . The four plays sometimes featured linked stories. Only one complete trilogy of tragedies has survived,

3325-584: Is explained by his bent of mind or imagination which was 'so encompassing, so receptive to the plurality of diverse orders of experience.' When compared to the drama of Greek antiquity and French classicism Shakespeare's forms are 'richer but hybrid'. Numerous books and plays continue to be written in the tradition of tragedy to this day examples include Froth on the Daydream , The Road , The Fault in Our Stars , Fat City , Rabbit Hole , Requiem for

3458-436: Is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that

3591-511: Is partly a meditation on the form 'free-love' that the Benjamins were experimenting with in their marriage at this time, amongst other things. But this was only tangential to the issue that led to the controversy to which Arendt refers. His mistake (per Arendt) was killing a sacred cow from amongst the academic establishment. As so often in Benjamin's writings, his study of Goethe's Elective Affinities

3724-586: Is the most common form of tragedy adapted into modern day television programs , books , films , theatrical plays , etc. Newly dealt with themes that sprang forth from the Domestic tragedy movement include: wrongful convictions and executions, poverty, starvation, addiction , alcoholism , debt, structural abuse , child abuse , crime , domestic violence , social shunning , depression , and loneliness. Classical Domestic tragedies include: Contemporary with Shakespeare, an entirely different approach to facilitating

3857-469: The Oresteia of Aeschylus. The Greek theatre was in the open air, on the side of a hill, and performances of a trilogy and satyr play probably lasted most of the day. Performances were apparently open to all citizens, including women, but evidence is scant. The theatre of Dionysus at Athens probably held around 12,000 people. All of the choral parts were sung (to the accompaniment of an aulos ) and some of

3990-457: The ekkyklêma as a theatrical device, which was a platform hidden behind the scene that could be rolled out to display the aftermath of some event which had happened out of sight of the audience. This event was frequently a brutal murder of some sort, an act of violence which could not be effectively portrayed visually, but an action of which the other characters must see the effects for it to have meaning and emotional resonance. A prime example of

4123-589: The Frankfurt School , Benjamin published Charles Baudelaire, Tableaux Parisiens . At this time he became acquainted with Theodor Adorno and befriended Georg Lukács , whose The Theory of the Novel (1920) influenced him. Meanwhile, inflation in the Weimar Republic after the war made it difficult for Emil Benjamin to continue supporting his son's family. At the end of 1923 Scholem emigrated to Palestine, then under

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4256-502: The Golden Age of 5th-century Athenian tragedy), Aristotle provides the earliest surviving explanation for the origin of the dramatic art form in his Poetics , in which he argues that tragedy developed from the improvisations of the leader of choral dithyrambs ( hymns sung and danced in praise of Dionysos , the god of wine and fertility): Anyway, arising from an improvisatory beginning (both tragedy and comedy—tragedy from

4389-576: The Gustav Wyneken 's German Youth Movement that Benjamin was first encountered by Gershom Scholem and later Martin Buber although he had parted ways with the youth group before they had become properly acquainted. Elected president of the Freie Studentenschaft (Free Students Association), Benjamin wrote essays arguing for educational and general cultural change while working alongside Wyneken at

4522-624: The Institute for Social Research and is best remembered as the co-author of Benjamin's closest disciple Theodor Adorno 's magnum opus, the Dialectic of the Enlightenment (a book which cribs heavily from Benjamin's unpublished, esoteric writings in many of its most important passages). In the case of Benjamin's habilitation, however, Horkheimer presents a united front with Cornelius and Professor Schultz in asking Benjamin to withdraw his application for

4655-566: The Latin verse tragedy Eccerinis , which uses the story of the tyrant Ezzelino III da Romano to highlight the danger to Padua posed by Cangrande della Scala of Verona . It was the first secular tragedy written since Roman times, and may be considered the first Italian tragedy identifiable as a Renaissance work. The earliest tragedies to employ purely classical themes are the Achilles written before 1390 by Antonio Loschi of Vicenza (c.1365–1441) and

4788-621: The Progne of the Venetian Gregorio Correr (1409–1464) which dates from 1428 to 1429. In 1515 Gian Giorgio Trissino (1478–1550) of Vicenza wrote his tragedy Sophonisba in the vernacular that would later be called Italian. Drawn from Livy 's account of Sophonisba , the Carthaginian princess who drank poison to avoid being taken by the Romans, it adheres closely to classical rules. It

4921-565: The University of Berlin to continue studying philosophy. There, Benjamin had his first exposure to Zionism , which had not been part of his liberal upbringing. This gave him occasion to formulate his own ideas about the meaning of Judaism. Benjamin distanced himself from political and nationalist Zionism, instead developing in his own thinking what he called a kind of " cultural Zionism "—an attitude that recognized and promoted Judaism and Jewish values . In Benjamin's formulation, his Jewishness meant

5054-485: The University of Munich , where he met Rainer Maria Rilke and Scholem; the latter became a friend. Intensive discussions with Scholem about Judaism and Jewish mysticism gave the impetus for the 1916 text (surviving as a manuscript) Über Sprache überhaupt und über die Sprache des Menschen (" On Language as Such and on the Language of Man "), which, as Benjamin said to Scholem , "has an immanent relationship to Judaism and to

5187-548: The Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung journal of the Institute for Social Research. It was a critique of the authenticity of mass-produced art; he wrote that a mechanically produced copy of an artwork can be taken somewhere the original could never have gone, arguing that the presence of the original is "prerequisite to the concept of authenticity". In 1937 Benjamin worked on "Das Paris des Second Empire bei Baudelaire" ("The Paris of

5320-428: The tragédie en musique is regarded as a distinct musical genre. Some later operatic composers have also shared Peri's aims: Richard Wagner 's concept of Gesamtkunstwerk ("integrated work of art"), for example, was intended as a return to the ideal of Greek tragedy in which all the arts were blended in service of the drama. Nietzsche , in his The Birth of Tragedy (1872) was to support Wagner in his claims to be

5453-467: The 17th century . Towards the close of the eighteenth century, having studied her predecessors, Joanna Baillie wanted to revolutionise theatre, believing that it could be used more effectively to affect people's lives. To this end she gave a new direction to tragedy, which she as 'the unveiling of the human mind under the dominion of those strong and fixed passions, which seemingly unprovoked by outward circumstances, will from small beginnings brood within

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5586-539: The Bible, from contemporary events and from short story collections (Italian, French and Spanish). The Greek tragic authors ( Sophocles and Euripides ) would become increasingly important as models by the middle of the 17th century. Important models were also supplied by the Spanish Golden Age playwrights Pedro Calderón de la Barca , Tirso de Molina and Lope de Vega , many of whose works were translated and adapted for

5719-727: The French government and incarcerated for three months in a prison camp near Nevers , in central Burgundy . Returning to Paris in January 1940, he drafted "Über den Begriff der Geschichte" ("On the Concept of History", later published as " Theses on the Philosophy of History "). While the Wehrmacht was pushing back the French Army , on 13 June Benjamin and his sister fled Paris to the town of Lourdes , just

5852-470: The French stage. Dutch Renaissance and Golden Age The common forms are the: In English, the most famous and most successful tragedies are those of William Shakespeare and his Elizabethan contemporaries. Shakespeare's tragedies include: A contemporary of Shakespeare, Christopher Marlowe , also wrote examples of tragedy in English, notably: John Webster (1580?–1635?), also wrote famous plays of

5985-640: The French–Spanish border and arrived at the coastal town of Portbou , in Catalonia on 25 September 1940. The Franco government had cancelled all transit visas and ordered the Spanish police to return such persons to France, including the Jewish refugee group Benjamin had joined. They were told by the Spanish police that they would be deported back to France the next day, which would have thwarted Benjamin's plans to travel to

6118-596: The Greek versions in their long declamatory, narrative accounts of action, their obtrusive moralising, and their bombastic rhetoric. They dwell on detailed accounts of horrible deeds and contain long reflective soliloquies . Though the gods rarely appear in these plays, ghosts and witches abound. Senecan tragedies explore ideas of revenge , the occult, the supernatural, suicide, blood and gore. The Renaissance scholar Julius Caesar Scaliger (1484–1558), who knew both Latin and Greek, preferred Seneca to Euripides. Classical Greek drama

6251-459: The Greek world), and continued to be popular until the beginning of the Hellenistic period . No tragedies from the 6th century and only 32 of the more than a thousand that were performed in the 5th century have survived. We have complete texts extant by Aeschylus , Sophocles , and Euripides . Aeschylus' The Persians is recognized to be the earliest extant Greek tragedy, and as such it

6384-448: The Institute for Social Research, later going permanently into exile. In Paris, he met other refugee German artists and intellectuals; he befriended Hannah Arendt , novelist Hermann Hesse , and composer Kurt Weill . In 1936, a first version of " The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction " (originally written in German in 1935) was published in French ("L'œuvre d'art à l'époque de sa reproduction méchanisée") by Max Horkheimer in

6517-675: The Second Empire in Baudelaire"), met Georges Bataille (to whom he later entrusted the Arcades Project manuscript), and joined the College of Sociology (which he would criticize for its "pre-fascist aestheticism.") In 1938 he paid a last visit to Brecht, who was exiled to Denmark. Meanwhile, the Nazi régime stripped German Jews of their German citizenship; now a stateless man, Benjamin was arrested by

6650-517: The United States. Expecting repatriation to Nazi hands, Benjamin killed himself with an overdose of morphine tablets that night, while staying at the Hotel de Francia ; the official Portbou register records 26 September 1940 as the date of death. Benjamin's colleague Arthur Koestler , also fleeing Europe, attempted suicide by taking some of the morphine tablets, but survived. Benjamin's brother Georg

6783-480: The actors' answers to the chorus were sung as well. The play as a whole was composed in various verse metres. All actors were male and wore masks. A Greek chorus danced as well as sang, though no one knows exactly what sorts of steps the chorus performed as it sang. Choral songs in tragedy are often divided into three sections: strophe ("turning, circling"), antistrophe ("counter-turning, counter-circling") and epode ("after-song"). Many ancient Greek tragedians employed

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6916-535: The age of 48, Benjamin died by suicide at Portbou on the French–Spanish border while attempting to escape the advance of the Third Reich . Though popular acclaim eluded him during his life, the decades following his death won his work posthumous renown. Walter Benjamin and his younger siblings, Georg (1895–1942) and Dora (1901–1946), were born to a wealthy business family of assimilated Ashkenazi Jews in Berlin , then

7049-472: The angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress. The final paragraph about the Jewish quest for the Messiah provides a final point to Benjamin's work, with its themes of culture, destruction, Jewish heritage and the fight between humanity and nihilism. He brings up

7182-511: The approach of the enemy, when he might have been combated most successfully; and where the suffering him to pass may be considered as occasioning all the misery that ensues.' In 1851, the tragedy El Palacio de Medrano , written by Pablo J. Villaseñor, was first performed at the Teatro Principal in Guadalajara on June 10th, 1851. Bourgeois tragedy (German: Bürgerliches Trauerspiel) is

7315-426: The audience through their experience of these emotions in response to the suffering of the characters in the drama. According to Aristotle, "the structure of the best tragedy should not be simple but complex and one that represents incidents arousing fear and pity —for that is peculiar to this form of art." This reversal of fortune must be caused by the tragic hero's hamartia , which is often translated as either

7448-460: The audience; only comedy should depict middle-class people. Domestic tragedy breaks with Aristotle's precepts, taking as its subjects merchants or citizens whose lives have less consequence in the wider world. The advent of the domestic tragedy ushered in the first phase shift of the genre focusing less on the Aristotelian definition of the genre and more on the definition of tragedy on the scale of

7581-406: The aura is found in a work of art that contains presence. The aura is precisely what cannot be reproduced in a work of art: its original presence in time and space. He suggests a work of art's aura is in a state of decay because it is becoming more and more difficult to apprehend the time and space in which a piece of art is created. This essay also introduces the concept of the optical unconscious,

7714-477: The breast, till all the better dispositions, all the fair gifts of nature are borne down before them'. This theory, she put into practice in her 'Series of Plays on the Passions' in three volumes (commencing in 1798) and in other dramatic works. Her method was to create a series of scenes and incidents intended to capture the audience's inquisitiveness and 'trace the progress of the passion, pointing out those stages in

7847-494: The capital of the German Empire . Walter's father, Emil Benjamin, was a banker in Paris who had relocated from France to Germany, where he worked as an antiques trader; he later married Pauline Schönflies. He owned a number of investments in Berlin, including ice skating rinks. Walter's uncle, William Stern , was a prominent German child psychologist who developed the concept of the intelligence quotient (IQ). He also had

7980-462: The characteristics of Greek tragedy and the traditions that developed from that period. In the Foreword (1980) to a new edition of his book Steiner concluded that 'the dramas of Shakespeare are not a renascence of or a humanistic variant of the absolute tragic model. They are, rather, a rejection of this model in the light of tragi-comic and "realistic" criteria.' In part, this feature of Shakespeare's mind

8113-434: The clearest is Eustathius 1769.45: "They called those competing tragedians, clearly because of the song over the billy goat"... Athenian tragedy—the oldest surviving form of tragedy—is a type of dance-drama that formed an important part of the theatrical culture of the city-state. Having emerged sometime during the 6th century BCE, it flowered during the 5th century BCE (from the end of which it began to spread throughout

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8246-407: The critic Paul de Man argued that the intellectual range of Benjamin's writings flows dynamically among those three intellectual traditions, deriving a critique via juxtaposition; the exemplary synthesis is "Theses on the Philosophy of History". At least one scholar, historian of religion Jason Josephson-Storm , has argued that Benjamin's diverse interests may be understood in part by understanding

8379-464: The delivery of this piece by several years. Benjamin was a close colleague of Ernst Bloch while Bloch was writing the Spirit of Utopia and maintained a relationship with him until the late 20's that Bloch later described as "almost too close." An untitled scrap omitted from Benjamin's book review of Bloch's Spirit of Utopia which remained unpublished during Benjamin's lifetime (later anthologized under

8512-416: The derivative definition tends to ask what expresses itself through tragedy". The second is the substantive way of defining tragedy, which starts with the work of art which is assumed to contain the ordering of the world. Substantive critics "are interested in the constituent elements of art, rather than its ontological sources". He recognizes four subclasses: a. "definition by formal elements" (for instance

8645-405: The drama, where tragedy is opposed to comedy i.e. melancholic stories. Although the utilization of key elements such as suffering, hamartia, morality, and spectacle ultimately ties this variety of tragedy to all the rest. This variant of tragedy noticeably had a larger number of stories that featured characters' downfalls being due to circumstances out of their control - a feature first established by

8778-475: The end of the century. Racine's two late plays ("Esther" and "Athalie") opened new doors to biblical subject matter and to the use of theatre in the education of young women. Racine also faced criticism for his irregularities: when his play, Bérénice , was criticised for not containing any deaths, Racine disputed the conventional view of tragedy. For more on French tragedy of the 16th and 17th centuries, see French Renaissance literature and French literature of

8911-493: The essay forms the "third major philosophical-aesthetic treatise of the early work" alongside the PhD dissertation and the habilitation thesis . It has often been linked to the breakup of his marriage. The dedication to Julia Cohn, whom he had courted in vain at the time, suggests this. Likewise, according to Hannah Arendt , it was his essay on Goethe that ruined Benjamin's only chance of a university career. Benjamin's Goethe monograph

9044-490: The feuilleton played a decisive role in shaping the prose form on which the book is based." Written contemporaneously with Martin Heidegger's Being & Time , Benjamin's work from this period explores much of the same territory: formally in his "Epistemo-Critical Prologue" to The Origin of German Tragic Drama , and as sketches, allusions and asides in One Way Street. The Passagenwerk ( Arcades Project , 1927–40)

9177-706: The first chapter of the Genesis ". In that period, Benjamin wrote about the 18th-century Romantic German poet Friedrich Hölderlin . In 1917 Benjamin transferred to the University of Bern ; there he met Ernst Bloch , and Dora Sophie Pollak (née Kellner), whom he married. They had a son, Stefan Rafael, in 1918. In 1919 Benjamin earned his PhD summa cum laude with the dissertation Der Begriff der Kunstkritik in der deutschen Romantik ( The Concept of Art Criticism in German Romanticism ). For his postdoctoral thesis in 1920, Benjamin hit upon an idea very similar to

9310-454: The first of all modern tragedies is A Castro , by Portuguese poet and playwright António Ferreira , written around 1550 (but only published in 1587) in polymetric verse (most of it being blank hendecasyllables), dealing with the murder of Inês de Castro , one of the most dramatic episodes in Portuguese history. Although these three Italian plays are often cited, separately or together, as being

9443-420: The first regular tragedies in modern times, as well as the earliest substantial works to be written in blank hendecasyllables, they were apparently preceded by two other works in the vernacular: Pamfila or Filostrato e Panfila written in 1498 or 1508 by Antonio Cammelli (Antonio da Pistoia); and a Sophonisba by Galeotto del Carretto of 1502. From about 1500 printed copies, in the original languages, of

9576-520: The following suppositions: Corneille continued to write plays through 1674 (mainly tragedies, but also something he called "heroic comedies") and many continued to be successes, although the "irregularities" of his theatrical methods were increasingly criticised (notably by François Hédelin, abbé d'Aubignac ) and the success of Jean Racine from the late 1660s signalled the end of his preeminence. Jean Racine 's tragedies—inspired by Greek myths, Euripides , Sophocles and Seneca —condensed their plot into

9709-544: The genre: Domestic tragedies are tragedies in which the tragic protagonists are ordinary middle-class or working-class individuals. This subgenre contrasts with classical and Neoclassical tragedy, in which the protagonists are of kingly or aristocratic rank and their downfall is an affair of state as well as a personal matter. The Ancient Greek theorist Aristotle had argued that tragedy should concern only great individuals with great minds and souls, because their catastrophic downfall would be more emotionally powerful to

9842-502: The habilitation teaching credential at the University of Frankfurt at Frankfurt am Main, fearing its possible rejection. The work was a study in which he sought to "save" the category of allegory . It proved too unorthodox and abstruse for its examiners, who included prominent members of the humanities faculty, such as Hans Cornelius . Max Horkheimer also sat on the panel of examiners who rejected Benjamin's thesis. Horkheimer later serves as both patron and promoter of Benjamin's work at

9975-466: The habilitation to avoid disgrace on the occasion of the examination. That is to say: His committee informed him that he will not be accepted as an academic instructor in the German university system. A diagram of the internecine dynamics of Benjamin's habilitation committee's rejection of his work bear recollection here, as they determine something of the character of his later career and ultimate legacy. Hans Cornelius had been Adorno's mentor in

10108-415: The heading of theology". After Scholem sympathetically informed his friend that his interest in the concept had been pre-empted by Heidegger's earlier publication, Benjamin seemed to have derived a lifelong antagonism toward the rival philosopher whose major insights, over the course of both of their careers, sometimes overlapped and sometimes conflicted with Benjamin's. Incidentally, at that time Heidegger

10241-400: The heart of every day things, what Benjamin would later call a mode of empathy with 'the soul of the commodity'" according to Michael Jennings in his introduction to the work. He continues: "Many of the pieces...first appeared in the feuilleton section," of newspapers and magazines which was "not a separate section but rather an area at the bottom of every page...and the spatial restrictions of

10374-453: The hero. It is also a misconception that this reversal can be brought about by a higher power (e.g. the law, the gods, fate , or society), but if a character's downfall is brought about by an external cause, Aristotle describes this as a misadventure and not a tragedy. In addition, the tragic hero may achieve some revelation or recognition ( anagnorisis —"knowing again" or "knowing back" or "knowing throughout") about human fate, destiny, and

10507-485: The importance of Karl Korsch 's interpretation of Capital to understanding Benjamin's engagement with Marxism in later works like the Arcades . Karl Korsch's Karl Marx , which was "one of Benjamin's main sources [on]... Marxism," introduced him "to an advanced understanding of Marxism." "Theses on the Philosophy of History" is often cited as Benjamin's last complete work, having been completed, according to Adorno, in

10640-475: The influence of Western Esotericism on Benjamin. Some of Benjamin's key ideas were adapted from occultists and New Age figures including Eric Gutkind and Ludwig Klages , and his interest in esotericism is known to have extended far beyond the Jewish Kabbalah . In addition to Brecht's Marxism, Adorno's critical theory, and Scholem's Jewish mysticism, Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings have underscored

10773-530: The institutional context of the university, whereas once Adorno started actually teaching as a professor at the University of Frankfurt, he devoted his seminars to Benjamin's rejected work. Adorno's 1931 and 1932 seminars, delivered at Frankfurt University , devoted themselves to a close reading of the Origins of German Tragic Drama . Adorno was still teaching this class on the Origins of German Tragic Drama during

10906-438: The intellectuals to each other. In that time, Benjamin also briefly embarked upon an academic career, as an instructor at the University of Heidelberg . In 1932, during the turmoil preceding Adolf Hitler 's assumption of the office of Chancellor of Germany , Benjamin left Germany temporarily for the Spanish island of Ibiza where he stayed for some months; he then moved to Nice , where he considered killing himself. Perceiving

11039-573: The interdiction, in some varieties of Judaism, of attempts to determine the year when the Messiah would come into the world, and points out that this did not make Jews indifferent to the future "for every second of time was the strait gate through which the Messiah might enter". Perhaps Walter Benjamin's best-known essay, "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction," identifies the perceptual shift that takes place when technological advancements emphasize speed and reproducibility. Benjamin argues that

11172-543: The kabbalah, God's attributes were once held in vessels whose glass was contaminated by the presence of evil and these vessels had consequently shattered, disseminating their contents to the four corners of the earth. Tikkun was the process of collecting the scattered fragments in the hopes of once more piecing them together. Benjamin fused tikkun with the Surrealist notion that liberation would come through releasing repressed collective material, to produce his celebrated account of

11305-406: The last time, and considered emigrating from Germany to Palestine. In 1928, he and Dora separated (they divorced two years later, in 1930); in the same year he published Einbahnstraße ( One-Way Street ), and a revision of his habilitation thesis Ursprung des Deutschen Trauerspiels ( The Origin of German Tragic Drama ). In 1929 Berlin, Lācis, then an assistant to Bertolt Brecht , socially presented

11438-426: The later Roman tragedies of Seneca ; through its singular articulations in the works of Shakespeare , Lope de Vega , Jean Racine , and Friedrich Schiller to the more recent naturalistic tragedy of Henrik Ibsen and August Strindberg ; Natyaguru Nurul Momen 's Nemesis ' tragic vengeance & Samuel Beckett 's modernist meditations on death, loss and suffering; Heiner Müller postmodernist reworkings of

11571-668: The later years of the republic and by means of the Roman Empire (27 BCE-476 CE), theatre spread west across Europe, around the Mediterranean and even reached Britain. While Greek tragedy continued to be performed throughout the Roman period, the year 240 BCE marks the beginning of regular Roman drama . Livius Andronicus began to write Roman tragedies, thus creating some of the first important works of Roman literature . Five years later, Gnaeus Naevius also began to write tragedies (though he

11704-469: The leaders of the dithyramb, and comedy from the leaders of the phallic processions which even now continue as a custom in many of our cities), [tragedy] grew little by little, as [the poets] developed whatever [new part] of it had appeared; and, passing through many changes, tragedy came to a halt, since it had attained its own nature. In the same work, Aristotle attempts to provide a scholastic definition of what tragedy is: Tragedy is, then, an enactment of

11837-574: The legendary and controversial youth magazine Der Anfang (The beginning), that was banned in all schools in Bavaria. Wyneken's thesis that a new youth must pave the way for revolutionary cultural change became the main theme of all of Benjamin's publications at that time. When not reelected as student association president, he returned to Freiburg to study, with particular attention to the lectures of Heinrich Rickert ; at that time he traveled to France and Italy. Benjamin's attempt to volunteer for service at

11970-576: The outbreak of World War I in August 1914 was rejected by the army. Benjamin later feigned illnesses to avoid conscription, allowing him to continue his studies and his translations of works by French poet Charles Baudelaire . His conspicuous refuge in Switzerland on dubious medical grounds was a likely factor in his ongoing challenges in obtaining academic employment after the war. The next year, 1915, Benjamin moved to Munich, and continued his schooling at

12103-666: The outbreak of the first World War; another was one of the Jewish Liaisons who took Nazi diplomats on a tour of Palestine. This happened while the Third Reich was preparing the European Zionists to believe that Europe's Jews would be forcibly emigrated from the Reich, to deflect attention from the looming possibility of the strategy that was ultimately adopted: mass extermination in the death camps . Scholem, Benjamin's oldest friend, and

12236-634: The outskirts of many of the most important events within the intellectual ferment of the interwar-period in Weimar Germany and interpreted those events in his writing. He was in the crowd at the conference where Kurt Gödel first described the incompleteness theorem . He once took a class on the Ancient Mayans from Rilke. He attended the same seminar as Heidegger at Freiburg in the summer of 1913 when both men were still university students: concepts first encountered there influenced their thought for

12369-476: The play's reception was lukewarm, leading to only eight productions by the end of the 188th century. Tragedy Tragedy (from the Ancient Greek : τραγῳδία , tragōidia ) is a genre of drama based on human suffering and, mainly, the terrible or sorrowful events that befall a main character or cast of characters. Traditionally, the intention of tragedy is to invoke an accompanying catharsis , or

12502-445: The readers of which likewise dismissed Benjamin's work. The university officials recommended that Benjamin withdraw Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels as a habilitation thesis to avoid formal rejection and public embarrassment. He heeded the advice, and three years later, in 1928, he published The Origin of German Tragic Drama as a book. Einbahnstraße ( One Way Street , 1928) is a series of meditations written primarily during

12635-436: The rebirth of tragedy in the contemporary theatre, most notably in his volume Arguments for a Theatre . "You emerge from tragedy equipped against lies. After the musical, you're anybody's fool," he insists. Critics such as George Steiner have even been prepared to argue that tragedy may no longer exist in comparison with its former manifestations in classical antiquity. In The Death of Tragedy (1961) George Steiner outlined

12768-582: The rebirth of tragedy was taken in Italy. Jacopo Peri , in the preface to his Euridice refers to "the ancient Greeks and Romans (who in the opinion of many sang their staged tragedies throughout in representing them on stage)." The attempts of Peri and his contemporaries to recreate ancient tragedy gave rise to the new Italian musical genre of opera. In France, tragic operatic works from the time of Lully to about that of Gluck were not called opera, but tragédie en musique ("tragedy in music") or some similar name;

12901-574: The remainder of their careers. He was an early draft script reader, comrade, favorable critic and promoter as well as a frequent house-guest of the Berlin cabaret theater scene writer and director Bertolt Brecht . Martin Buber took an interest in Benjamin, but Benjamin declined to contribute to Buber's journal because it was too exoteric . Nevertheless, Buber financed Benjamin's trip to Moscow and promoted his career in other ways. Nominally, Buber had commissioned Benjamin to write an article Moscow for his Die Kreatur, though Benjamin blew his deadline for

13034-498: The revolutionary historiographer, who sought to grab hold of elided memories as they sparked to view at moments of present danger. In the essay, Benjamin's famed ninth thesis struggles to reconcile the Idea of Progress in the present with the apparent chaos of the past: A Klee painting named Angelus Novus shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth

13167-520: The same phase as The Origin of German Tragic Drama , after Benjamin had met Asja Lācis on the beach at Capri in 1924. He finished the cycle in 1926, and put it out the same year that his failed thesis was published. One Way Street is a collage work. Greil Marcus compares certain formal qualities of the book to the graphic novel Hundred Headless Women by Max Ernst , or to Walter Ruttman's The Weekend (an early sound collage film) . The book avoids "all semblance of linear-narrative...[offering]

13300-438: The shapes of their choruses and styles of dancing. A common descent from pre- Hellenic fertility and burial rites has been suggested. Friedrich Nietzsche discussed the origins of Greek tragedy in his early book The Birth of Tragedy (1872). Here, he suggests the name originates in the use of a chorus of goat-like satyrs in the original dithyrambs from which the tragic genre developed. Scott Scullion writes: There

13433-656: The sociopolitical and cultural significance of the Reichstag fire (27 February 1933) as the de facto Nazi assumption of full power in Germany, then manifest with the subsequent persecution of the Jews , he left Berlin and Germany for good in September. He moved to Paris, but before doing so he sought shelter in Svendborg , at Bertolt Brecht's house, and at Sanremo , where his ex-wife Dora lived. As he ran out of money, Benjamin collaborated with Max Horkheimer , and received funds from

13566-520: The sole executor of his literary estate, would resurrect the canonical books of the Kabbalah from private libraries and ancient document dumps called Genizah . These were created when the books flooded into Mandatory Palestine during the period leading up to, coinciding with, and immediately following the Holocaust . In 1923, when the Institute for Social Research was founded, later to become home to

13699-489: The spring of 1940. The Institute for Social Research, which had relocated to New York, published Theses in Benjamin's memory in 1942. Margaret Cohen writes in the Cambridge Companion to Walter Benjamin : In the "Concept of History" Benjamin also turned to Jewish mysticism for a model of praxis in dark times, inspired by the kabbalistic precept that the work of the holy man is an activity known as tikkun . According to

13832-405: The subject of Baroque drama in the first place, only to reject the thesis that derived from this recommendation--is virtually altogether forgotten. The episode in the history of the German academy is immortalized in the bon mot , "One cannot habilitate intellect." This failure resulted in his father's refusal to continue to support him financially, so that Benjamin was forced to make ends meet as

13965-425: The supposed "three unities"); b. "definition by situation" (where one defines tragedy for instance as "exhibiting the fall of a good man"); c. "definition by ethical direction" (where the critic is concerned with the meaning, with the "intellectual and moral effect); and d. "definition by emotional effect" (and he cites Aristotle's "requirement of pity and fear"). Aristotle wrote in his work Poetics that tragedy

14098-509: The thesis proposed by Martin Heidegger in the latter's own postdoctoral project ( Duns Scotus: Theory of Categories and Meaning ). Wolfram Eilenberger writes that Benjamin's plan was "to legitimize [his theory of language] with reference to a largely forgotten tradition [found in the archaic writings of Duns Scotus ], and to strike the sparks of systematization from the apparent disjunct among modern, logical, and analytical linguistic philosophy and medieval speculations on language that fell under

14231-461: The throats of her two children. The final act of the play ends with Médée's escape in a chariot pulled by two dragons, and Jason's suicide. Médée was Corneille's first tragedy. Furthermore, the performances of Médée followed Corneille's expulsion from Richelieu 's prestigious group of five authors. The playwright no longer had the protection of Richelieu , who, resentful, greeted Corneille's first tragedy with disapproval. During its installation,

14364-415: The title "Theologico-Political Fragment") is now perhaps better remembered than the larger work it cites as an authority for its mystical reflections. It was Bloch's commission that inspired Benjamin's work on the theory of categories , according to Scholem. This was to be a consequential theme throughout his career. One of Benjamin's high-school best friends (also a German Jew) killed himself using gas at

14497-807: The traditional division between comedy and tragedy in an anti- or a- generic deterritorialisation from the mid-19th century onwards. Both Bertolt Brecht and Augusto Boal define their epic theatre projects ( non-Aristotelian drama and Theatre of the Oppressed , respectively) against models of tragedy. Taxidou, however, reads epic theatre as an incorporation of tragic functions and its treatments of mourning and speculation. The word "tragedy" appears to have been used to describe different phenomena at different times. It derives from Classical Greek τραγῳδία , contracted from trag(o)-aoidiā = "goat song", which comes from tragos = "he-goat" and aeidein = "to sing" ( cf. "ode"). Scholars suspect this may be traced to

14630-410: The tragedies of Shakespeare - and less due to their own personal flaws. This variant of tragedy has led to the evolution and development of tragedies of the modern era especially those past the mid-1800s such as the works of Arthur Miller , Eugene O'Neill and Henrik Ibsen . This variant of tragedy is especially popular in the modern age due to its characters being more relatable to mass audiences and

14763-412: The tragic canon, tragedy has remained an important site of cultural experimentation, negotiation, struggle, and change. A long line of philosophers —which includes Plato , Aristotle , Saint Augustine , Voltaire , Hume , Diderot , Hegel , Schopenhauer , Kierkegaard , Nietzsche , Freud , Benjamin , Camus , Lacan , and Deleuze —have analysed, speculated upon, and criticised the genre. In

14896-471: The ultimate horror, withdrawal and rejection with which members of the circle greeted the Nazi regime ) this group's commitment to particular archaic styles anticipated the aesthetics of fascism . Later that year Benjamin and Bloch resided on the Italian island of Capri ; Benjamin wrote Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels ( The Origin of German Tragic Drama ) as a habilitation thesis meant to qualify him as

15029-402: The use of the ekkyklêma is after the murder of Agamemnon in the first play of Aeschylus' Oresteia , when the king's butchered body is wheeled out in a grand display for all to see. Variations on the ekkyklêma are used in tragedies and other forms to this day, as writers still find it a useful and often powerful device for showing the consequences of extreme human actions. Another such device

15162-421: The wake of Aristotle's Poetics (335 BCE), tragedy has been used to make genre distinctions, whether at the scale of poetry in general (where the tragic divides against epic and lyric ) or at the scale of the drama (where tragedy is opposed to comedy ). In the modern era, tragedy has also been defined against drama, melodrama , the tragicomic , and epic theatre . Drama, in the narrow sense, cuts across

15295-506: The will of the gods. Aristotle terms this sort of recognition "a change from ignorance to awareness of a bond of love or hate." In Poetics , Aristotle gave the following definition in ancient Greek of the word "tragedy" (τραγῳδία): Walter Benjamin Among Benjamin's best known works are the essays " The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction " (1935), and " Theses on the Philosophy of History " (1940). His major work as

15428-433: The winter semester that Adolph Hitler came to power, although at that time it was not listed in the course catalog--whereas Adorno's academic mentor Cornelius, who had rejected this thesis, is today remembered primarily because of his rejection of Benjamin's habilitation. Horkheimer becomes a footnote to the career of Benjamin's apprentice. Schultz--the other member of Benjamin's committee who seems to have directed him to

15561-469: The work to the University of Frankfurt in 1925 as the postdoctoral dissertation meant to earn him the habilitation (qualification) to become a university instructor in Germany. Professor Schultz of the University of Frankfurt found The Origin of German Tragic Drama inappropriate for his Germanistik department (Department of German Language and Literature), and passed it to the Department of Aesthetics ,

15694-632: The works of Sophocles , Seneca , and Euripides , as well as comedic writers such as Aristophanes , Terence and Plautus , were available in Europe and the next forty years saw humanists and poets translating and adapting their tragedies. In the 1540s, the European university setting (and especially, from 1553 on, the Jesuit colleges) became host to a Neo-Latin theatre (in Latin) written by scholars. The influence of Seneca

15827-564: The year his father died, Benjamin went to Moscow to meet Lācis and found her ill in a sanatorium. During his stay in Moscow, he was asked by the editorial board of the Great Soviet Encyclopedia to write an article on Goethe for the first edition of the encyclopedia. Benjamin's article was ultimately rejected, with reviewer Anatoly Lunacharsky (then the People's Commissar of Education ) characterizing it as "non-encyclopedic", and only

15960-487: Was Benjamin's final, incomplete book about Parisian city life in the 19th century, especially about the Passages couverts de Paris —the covered passages that extended the culture of flânerie (idling and people-watching) when inclement weather made flânerie infeasible in the boulevards and streets proper. In this work Benjamin uses his fragmentary style to write about the rise of modern European urban culture . Several of

16093-523: Was a crane, the mechane , which served to hoist a god or goddess on stage when they were supposed to arrive flying. This device gave origin to the phrase " deus ex machina " ("god out of a machine"), that is, the surprise intervention of an unforeseen external factor that changes the outcome of an event. Following the expansion of the Roman Republic (509–27 BCE) into several Greek territories between 270 and 240 BCE, Rome encountered Greek tragedy . From

16226-408: Was a philosopher", while his younger colleagues Arendt and Adorno contend that he was "not a philosopher". Scholem remarked "The peculiar aura of authority emanating from his work tended to incite contradiction". Benjamin himself considered his research to be theological , though he eschewed all recourse to traditionally metaphysical sources of transcendentally revealed authority. In 1940, at

16359-515: Was based on Euripides ' Hippolytus . Historians do not know who wrote the only extant example of the fabula praetexta (tragedies based on Roman subjects), Octavia , but in former times it was mistakenly attributed to Seneca due to his appearance as a character in the tragedy. Seneca's tragedies rework those of all three of the Athenian tragic playwrights whose work has survived. Probably meant to be recited at elite gatherings, they differ from

16492-601: Was first produced in 1755, is said to be the earliest Bürgerliches Trauerspiel in Germany. In modernist literature , the definition of tragedy has become less precise. The most fundamental change has been the rejection of Aristotle's dictum that true tragedy can only depict those with power and high status. Arthur Miller 's essay "Tragedy and the Common Man" (1949) argues that tragedy may also depict ordinary people in domestic surroundings thus defining Domestic tragedies. British playwright Howard Barker has argued strenuously for

16625-774: Was killed at the Mauthausen-Gusen concentration camp in 1942. The others in his party were allowed passage the next day (maybe because Benjamin's suicide shocked Spanish officials), and safely reached Lisbon on 30 September. Arendt, who crossed the French-Spanish border at Portbou a few months later, passed the manuscript of Theses to Adorno. Another completed manuscript, which Benjamin had carried in his suitcase, disappeared after his death and has not been recovered. In addition to his lifelong dialogue in letters with Gershom Scholem , Walter Benjamin maintained an intense correspondence with Theodor Adorno and Bertolt Brecht , and

16758-624: Was largely forgotten in Western Europe from the Middle Ages to the beginning of the 16th century. Medieval theatre was dominated by mystery plays , morality plays , farces and miracle plays . In Italy, the models for tragedy in the later Middle Ages were Roman, particularly the works of Seneca, interest in which was reawakened by the Paduan Lovato de' Lovati (1241–1309). His pupil Albertino Mussato (1261–1329), also of Padua, in 1315 wrote

16891-415: Was marked by polemics and the theme of his assault in this work concerned Friedrich Gundolf 's Goethe book. Gundolf was the most prominent and able academic member of the (Stefan) George-Kreis --a cult of post-symbolist, romantic nationalist poets with a mystically conservative, medievalist bent. Elsewhere, in the anonymity of his private epistolary writings, Benjamin explicitly points out how (regardless of

17024-583: Was more appreciated for his comedies). No complete early Roman tragedy survives, though it was highly regarded in its day; historians know of three other early tragic playwrights— Quintus Ennius , Marcus Pacuvius and Lucius Accius . From the time of the empire, the tragedies of two playwrights survive—one is an unknown author, while the other is the Stoic philosopher Seneca . Nine of Seneca's tragedies survive, all of which are fabula crepidata (tragedies adapted from Greek originals); his Phaedra , for example,

17157-533: Was occasionally funded by the Frankfurt School under the direction of Adorno and Horkheimer , even from their New York City residence. At other times he received funding from Hebrew University or from funds made available by Martin Buber and his publishing associates including Salman Schocken . The dynamism or conflict between these competing influences—Brecht's Marxism, Adorno's critical theory , Scholem's Jewish mysticism—were central to his work, although their philosophic differences remained unresolved. Moreover,

17290-456: Was of fragile health and so in 1905 the family sent him to Hermann-Lietz-Schule Haubinda , a boarding school in the Thuringian countryside, for two years; in 1907, having returned to Berlin, he resumed his schooling at the Kaiser Friedrich School. In 1912, at the age of 20, he enrolled at the University of Freiburg , but at the summer semester's end, he returned to Berlin and matriculated at

17423-600: Was particularly strong in its humanist tragedy. His plays, with their ghosts, lyrical passages and rhetorical oratory, brought a concentration on rhetoric and language over dramatic action to many humanist tragedies. The most important sources for French tragic theatre in the Renaissance were the example of Seneca and the precepts of Horace and Aristotle (and contemporary commentaries by Julius Caesar Scaliger and Lodovico Castelvetro ), although plots were taken from classical authors such as Plutarch , Suetonius , etc., from

17556-664: Was soon followed by the Oreste and Rosmunda of Trissino's friend, the Florentine Giovanni di Bernardo Rucellai (1475–1525). Both were completed by early 1516 and are based on classical Greek models, Rosmunda on the Hecuba of Euripides , and Oreste on the Iphigenia in Tauris of the same author; like Sophonisba , they are in Italian and in blank (unrhymed) hendecasyllables . Another of

17689-616: Was soon to embark on a love affair with Hannah Arendt , later related to Benjamin through marriage to his cousin Günther Anders . Later, unable to support himself and family, Benjamin returned to Berlin and resided with his parents. In 1921 he published the essay "Zur Kritik der Gewalt" ("Toward the Critique of Violence"). At this time Benjamin first became socially acquainted with Leo Strauss , and he remained an admirer of Strauss and his work throughout his life. Starting in adolescence, in

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