Danton S Death A Play In Four Acts

This book examines the work of two major poets who wrote in the second half of the twentieth century, Yves Bonnefoy of France and the Syrian-born Adonis (born Ali Ahmed Said). In conducting close readings of key moments from their respective poetry, the author illustrates how both of these writers, in their own unique ways, construct poetry as a form of spiritual practice, that is, as a way of transforming both the poet's and the implied reader's ontological, perceptual, and creative relationships with their internal and external worlds.

Set during the French Revolution's Reign of Terror, the play takes place from March 24 to April 4, 1794, when Maximilien Robespierre was in charge of the Committee of Public Safety that, along with the Revolutionary Tribunal, condemned people to the guillotine. Guillotine victims ranged from those who were seen as too radical to those who were viewed as royalist sympathizers and even simply moderates like Danton. "Robert Auletta's adaptation of DANTON'S DEATH streamlined Buchner's epic romantic drama revolving around the passive, existential figure of Danton, a man who wishes to die in order to escape the horrors of the French Revolution. Auletta eliminated characters and combined scenes, but he did not change the story, omit the philosophical monologues, or minimize emotional elements. Danton's wife's suicide, Camille's wife's descent into insanity, and the contrast between Danton's passivity and his friend Camille's excitability all remain." -Ellen Halperin-Royer, Theatre Topics "It's not really a political but a philosophical play. The issues are timeless." -Robert Wilson "A political radical born the same year as Richard Wagner (1813), Georg Buchner was a student of the French Revolution from boyhood. Trained (like Chekhov) as a doctor, he wrote DANTON'S DEATH at age twenty-two as a way of financing his escape from arrest for revolutionary political activity. Reflecting his disillusionment with political action, the play was finished in only five weeks, but Buchner had to flee to France before it was published. He died in 1837 at age twenty-three years and four months. Unknown until the 1890s, Buchner influenced such modern literary movements as Naturalism, Expressionism, Social Realism, Psychological Irrationalism, Existential Theater, and Theater of the Absurd. The first of his only three plays, DANTON'S DEATH was not performed for some seventy years. But its classic status was instantly established in 1916 when the great Max Reinhardt staged it in Berlin. Orson Welles's Mercury Theater performed it in 1938." -William Albright, The Houston Post"

By exploring the concept of the tender gaze in German film, theater, and literature, this volume's contributors illustrate how perspective-taking in works of art fosters empathy and prosocial behaviors.

Sketches of opera composers, opera synopses, and CD reviews.

Stéphane Mosès explores in Displacements the poetry of Paul Celan and the work of major German-Jewish thinkers in the context of his distinction between normative and critical modernity. The first part contains a translation of his book Approches de Paul Celan, the third part a translation of his lecture series Figures philosophiques de la modernité juive, and the central section contains, alongside a text on Freud, essays on Goethe and Büchner that extend his analysis beyond the Jewish sphere while engaging with the questions of tradition and its fragmentation that he raises there. Edited, translated, and with an Introduction by Ashraf Noor.

In 850 analytical articles, this two-volume set explores the developments that influenced the profound changes in thought and sensibility during the second half of the eighteenth century and the first half of the nineteenth century. The Encyclopedia provides readers with a clear, detailed, and accurate reference source on the literature, thought, music, and art of the period, demonstrating the rich interplay of international influences and cross-currents at work; and to explore the many issues raised by the very concepts of Romantic and Romanticism.