Literary Form and Historical Redemption: On Walter Benjamin's The Origin of German Tragic Drama: From the Library of Political Philosophy

Author: Qin Lu
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2006-01-01
Features: Political philosophy is an interdisciplinary field. Its topics range from morality, religion, customs, to communities, nations, and their economic distribution methods, as well as gender, friendship, marriage, family, upbringing, education, and even literary and artistic expressions. Therefore, political philosophy possesses the characteristic of being unshackled from the rigid divisions of modern academic disciplines. At its core, political philosophy is a concentrated expression of self-awareness and self-reflection within a political consensus. In the beginning of the 21st century, Chinese scholars are fostering a new cultural consciousness, which will inevitably manifest as a questioning of political philosophy. This series, "Political Philosophy Library," aims to provide a starting point for political philosophy research in China with a modest academic approach, promoting the gradual maturation of Chinese political philosophy.
This book is divided into three parts and six chapters, discussing three concepts of redemption represented by tragedy, the novel, and the dirge in Western literary history, as well as the underlying intellectual transformations. Here, tragedy, the novel, and the dirge do not simply refer to the divisions of modern literary genres but rather to the three philosophical concepts of human-world relationships embodied by these literary forms. Thus, the purpose is to interpret Walter Benjamin's stance through a philosophical examination of the history of art.
Specifically, the first part analyzes the sophisticated techniques in Greek tragedy and classical tragic poetics for achieving a balance between humans and gods, as well as the failure of modern tragic philosophy to revisit this reconciliation, thereby completely negating the possibility of a renewed reconciliation between gods and humans in the mortal world. The second part examines the relationship between the novel and the epic—both its inheritance and its rupture—and the failure of redemption efforts through the novel, thereby negating the other extreme of achieving reconciliation through complete escape and forgetting of gods. The third part analyzes the third possibility that Walter Benjamin discovered in the Baroque dirge, which had been misunderstood and obscured for centuries: how to paradoxically achieve a new reconciliation with gods by abandoning reconciliation with them and reaffirming worldly values, thereby establishing a new modernity that is both a break from and connected to traditional antiquity.