Disenchanting Odysseus: Auerbach and Adorno on the Philhellenic Enlightenment
By Mathura Umachandran
Erich Auerbach and Theodor Adorno were just two of the many émigrés to flee from Germany in the 1930s, and it was in response to the convulsions of the Second World War that they produced their most influential projects. Auerbach’s Mimesis: the Representation of Reality in Western Literature (1946) is considered to have laid the foundations of the discipline of comparative literature, while Adorno’s Dialektik der Aufklärung (1947) is the best-known work of the Frankfurt school.
An Aristotelian Verfremdungseffekt; or, the rejection of the Poetics in Postdramatic Theatre
By Emma Cole
Hans-Thies Lehmann, in his 1991 monograph Theater und Mythos, claims that the postdramatic theatre of (post-)modernity is the antithesis of the pre-dramatic theatre of ancient Athens. In his subsequent study of the postdramatic, he maintains that this movement is characterised by a rejection of Aristotelian ideas about drama and, in particular, of Renaissance interpretations of the Poetics.
The tragedy of Aimé Césaire: building a future from the ruins of antiquity
By Adam Edward Lecznar
The revival of two thousand year old texts is not an obvious part of a future-oriented political agenda; nevertheless, this paper explores how the Martiniquan writer, intellectual and politician Aimé Césaire’s (1913-2008) reception of Greek tragedy became bound up in just such a project.