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Title: | On Schicksal: The Return of Tragedy in Modernity |
Authors: | Draxl, Alexander |
Advisors: | Doherty, Brigid Vogl, Joseph |
Contributors: | German Department |
Keywords: | conceptual history fate modernity tragedy tragic |
Subjects: | German literature |
Issue Date: | 2024 |
Publisher: | Princeton, NJ : Princeton University |
Abstract: | The historical trajectory of the German term Schicksal, which can be translated as fate, destiny, or vicissitude, is entwined with what this dissertation calls the return of tragedy in modernity. The dissertation traces the conceptual significance of Schicksal in modern German literature and thought to its elaboration in an eighteenth-century literary debate concerning the defining characteristics of tragedy. This debate initiated a turn toward tragedy not only in German philosophy but also in sociology and psychoanalysis. The dissertation unravels these cross-disciplinary entanglements in six chapters.Chapter 1 inaugurates a conceptual history of Schicksal. Coined around 1600 as a translation of the Latin term fatum, Schicksal was initially associated with fatalism, the doctrine that everything is determined by fate. Chapter 2 concentrates on a debate about tragedy in Weimar Classicism and Romanticism that fundamentally changed the discursive destiny of Schicksal. To figure the tragic dialectics of human freedom, Schicksal was reinvented as a dramatic device. Nineteenth-century philosophy, Chapter 3 argues, was heavily influenced by this literary debate. Philosophers F.W.J. Schelling (1775–1854) and G.W.F. Hegel (1770–1831) based their understanding of human existence on the tragic fates of heroes like Oedipus and Antigone. Chapter 4 broadens the dissertation’s scope by showing how sociologist Georg Simmel (1858–1918) reconceptualized Schicksal as a key term for the human sciences. Chapter 5, focusing on the libidinal vicissitudes that mark our psychic life, explores psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud’s (1856–1939) notion of Triebschicksale. Chapter 6 investigates how philosopher Martin Heidegger (1889–1976) reframed catastrophe as salvation. Building on research by Hungarian-American scholar and novelist Susan Taubes (1928–1969), the final chapter shows that Heidegger’s conception of Schicksal not only glorified destruction but also courted fascist politics. A coda to the dissertation asks whether tragedy, often declared dead, has a future. The dissertation analyzes the significance of Schicksal from the interdisciplinary perspective of Kulturwissenschaft, revealing that the conceptualization of tragedy and the tragic has informed German philosophical and social-scientific discourses since the eighteenth century, shaping their terminology, methodology, and modalities of knowledge production. Modernity is not a post-tragic era. In Schicksal, the spirit of tragedy lives on. |
URI: | http://arks.princeton.edu/ark:/88435/dsp010p096b240 |
Type of Material: | Academic dissertations (Ph.D.) |
Language: | en |
Appears in Collections: | German |
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