Literary Form and Historical Redemption (On Walter Benjamin's The Origin of German Tragic Drama)

Author: Qin Lu
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2005-03-01
Features: Political philosophy is an interdisciplinary field. Its topics range from morality, religion, customs, to communities, nations, and their economic distribution, as well as gender, friendship, marriage, family, upbringing, education, and even literary and artistic expressions. Therefore, political philosophy possesses the characteristic of being immune to the rigid divisions of modern academic specialization. At its core, political philosophy is a concentrated expression of self-awareness and self-reflection within a political consensus. In the beginning of the twenty-first 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 pragmatic academic approach, promoting the gradual maturation of Chinese political philosophy.
This book is divided into three parts and six chapters, discussing three redemption ideas represented by tragedy, the novel, and the elegy in the history of Western literature, as well as the underlying intellectual transformations. Here, tragedy, the novel, and the elegy do not simply refer to the divisions of modern literary genres but rather to the three philosophical concepts they represent regarding the relationship between humans and the world. 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 modern tragic philosophy's failed attempt 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's inheritance and rupture from epic, as well as the failed effort to achieve redemption through the novel, thereby negating the other extreme of achieving reconciliation—completely escaping and forgetting gods. The third part analyzes the third possibility that Walter Benjamin discovered in the Baroque elegies, which had been misunderstood and overshadowed for centuries. This possibility lies in paradoxically achieving a new reconciliation with gods by abandoning reconciliation with them and reaffirming the value of the mortal world, thereby establishing a new modernity that is both a rupture from and connected to traditional antiquity.