Major figures treated include Gryphius, Lessing, Schiller, Goethe, Grillparzer, Hebbel, Schnitzler, and Brecht. There is no competing work in English."--BOOK JACKET.

​This book, itself a study of two books on the Baroque, proposes a pair of related theses: one interpretive, the other argumentative. The first, enveloped in the second, holds that the significance of allegory Gilles Deleuze recognized in Walter Benjamin’s 1928 monograph on seventeenth century drama is itself attested in key aspects of Kantian, Leibnizian, and Platonic philosophy (to wit, in the respective forms by which thought is phrased, predicated, and proposed).The second, enveloping the first, is a literalist claim about predication itself – namely, that the aesthetics of agitation and hallucination so emblematic of the Baroque sensibility (as attested in its emblem-books) adduces an avowedly metaphysical ‘naturalism’ in which thought is replete with predicates. Oriented by Barbara Cassin’s development of the concerted sense in which homonyms are critically distinct from synonyms, the philosophical claim here is that ‘the Baroque’ names the intervallic [διαστηματική] relation that thought establishes between things. On this account, any subject finds its unity in a concerted state of disquiet – a state-rempli in which, phenomenologically speaking, experience comprises as much seeing as reading (as St Jerome encountering Origen’s Hexapla).

This collection of articles by both German literature specialists and German theater experts grew out of the Comparative Drama Conference held annually between February and March from 1977 to 1999 in Gainesville, Florida. At the center of the contributors' work is the productive tension between the literary and the performance aspects of German drama and theater. At the same time, the reception is truly American, since the German playwrights, directors, theorists, and dramatists discussed have gone through creative filters in the researching, performing, and teaching of German drama and theater on various campuses across the United States during the last third of the twentieth century.

In 1767, more than a century before Germany was incorporated as a modern nation-state, the city of Hamburg chartered the first Deutsches Nationaltheater. What can it have meant for a German playhouse to have been a national theater, and what did that imply about the way these theaters operated? Michael Sosulski contends that the idea of German nationhood not only existed prior to the Napoleonic Wars but was decisive in shaping cultural production in the last third of the eighteenth century, operating not on the level of popular consciousness but instead within representational practices and institutions. Grounding his study in a Foucauldian understanding of emergent technologies of the self, Sosulski connects the increasing performance of body discipline by professional actors, soldiers, and schoolchildren to the growing interest in German national identity. The idea of a German cultural nation gradually emerged as a conceptual force through the work of an influential series of literary intellectuals and advocates of a national theater, including G. E. Lessing and Friedrich Schiller. Sosulski combines fresh readings of canonical and lesser-known dramas, with analysis of eighteenth-century theories of nationhood and evolving acting theories, to show that the very lack of a strong national consciousness in the late eighteenth century actually spurred the emergence of the German Nationaltheater, which were conceived in the spirit of the Enlightenment as educational institutions. Since for Germans, nationality was a performed identity, theater emerged as an ideal space in which to imagine that nation.

German Expressionist Theatre: The Actor and the Stage considers the powerfully stylized, anti-realistic styles of acting on the German Expressionist stage from 1916 to 1921. It relates this striking departure from the dominant European acting tradition of realism to the specific cultural crises that enveloped the German nation during the course of its involvement in World War I. This book describes three distinct Expressionist acting styles, all of which in their own ways attempted to show how symbolic stage performance could be a powerful rhetorical resource for a culture struggling to come to terms with the crises of historical change. The examination of Expressionist script and actor memoirs allows for an unprecedented focus on description and analysis of acting itself.