For Monday, read pages 11-23, "German Sturm und Drang to Romanticism: Goethe, Kleist, ETA Hoffmann" in Harold Segel's Pinocchio's Progeny. Go to Google Books (www.books.google.com) and put "Pinocchio's Progeny" into the search engine. You should be able to scroll through the entire text.
Then take a look at this short video excerpt from a film version of Goethe's Faust by the great Czech animator, Jan Švankmajer. As you read in Segel, many of the theatre artists and dramatists of the period took inspiration from puppet theatre, and Goethe knew the story of Faustus especially from puppet theatre renditions. Think about what it is about marionettes and other puppets that fit with the aesthetics and values of such artists as Goethe, Kleist and Hugo even as the genre of melodrama is becoming so popular. How do both providential melodrama and this fascination with what today we might call "object performance" fit within the spirit of an age rocked by the French revolution and the rejection of Enlightenment rationalism?
Friday, March 27
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