Munch's Ibsen: A Painter's Visions of a Playwright (New Directions in Scandinavian Studies) by Joan Templeton
2010; Modern Humanities Research Association; Volume: 105; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1353/mlr.2010.0358
ISSN2222-4319
Autores Tópico(s)Cultural Studies and Interdisciplinary Research
Resumo614 Reviews the self and the other, themind and theworld' (p. 126). JurgenBarkhoff enquires with relish into female vampires, victimhood, and vengeance inGerman literature around 1800, and their apparent development frompassive victims into aggressive, predatory monsters. Examples by Goethe and E. T. A. Hoffmann demonstrated cultural conflict or magnetization on the nightside ofmesmerism, with parasitic male empowerment at the cost of thewoman' (p. 139). In an account ofmurderous women inGerman opera, Lawrence Kramer spells out musical parallels between Mozart's Donna Anna and Strauss's Salome. His analysis of the unvoicing of Salome primarily by the orchestra includes phrases that go to the heart of thematter. Unvoicing, he suggests, engenders an act of violence, the opera catching itselfand itsheroine 'in the act' (p. 155). The femme fatale, especially in the visual arts, focuses Kathrin Hoffmann Curtius's examination of sexuality and gender hierarchies inspiring artists around 1900. She contrasts an infamous Lustmorderin with depictions of the femme fatale to show the link between active female sexuality and dangerous aggression to wards males, who emerged either as virtuous heroes or as vengeful murderers. Clare Bielby's suggestive account of representations in 1962 of Vera Bruhne ex plains fascination with the 'natural order' and a need for theMadonna figure in German society after its collapse in 1945. Links between Nazism and Marlene Dietrich, Bruhne and the camp guard Use Koch pointed to the Federal Republic's self-idealization, themedia presenting Bruhne's supposed crime as an act against German women and norms of sexuality. Gisela Ecker reviews new poetological concepts for mourning in works by Marie Luise Kaschnitz and Friederike Mayrocker, who learnt to live on without partners and found new ways of writing. Where Kaschnitz experienced tensions between sublimation of mourning and bodily resistance to this, Mayrocker rooted gestures and emotions ofmourning in everyday life. Mayrocker thereby contradicted Freud's 'orderly view of a "natural end" to the mourning process' (p. 213), whereas Kaschnitz disrupted her pattern of symbiosis through Weiterschreiben to regain a voice of her own. Ecker also points to the loosening of gender divisions in the work of mourning in recent works by male authors and through the use of Internet platforms. This well-researched, wide-ranging, and often alarming volume describes dis courses thatpoint towards less gender-bound historical attitudes, showing brutality and mourning as dead ends, and inviting fresh interpretations of selected examples fromGerman culture. Mellen University, Iowa Brian Keith-Smith MuncWs Ibsen: A Painters Visions of a Playwright. By Joan Templeton. (New Directions in Scandinavian Studies) Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press. 2008. 185 pp. DKKi98;?20. ISBN 978-87-635-0792-9. JoanTempleton's book is a thorough investigation of the links between theworks and lives of two of themost internationally renowned and iconoclastic Norwe MLR, 105.2, 2010 615 gians, the dramatist Henrik Ibsen and the artist Edvard Munch. They were men of different generations, born thirty-fiveyears apart; Ibsen's play The Pretenders was written in 1863, the year ofMunch's birth, and theydid not meet until 1892, when Ibsen returned toNorway at the age of sixty-four. But Munch was from an early age drawn to Ibsen's plays, ofwhich hemade over 400 illustrations during different periods of his career?and to theman himself, ofwhom he did several revealing portraits. Templeton has made a systematic study of thematerial and discusses what the illustrations reveal about the plays, and what they reveal about the artist. She demonstrates how Munch read the plays through his own life, taking from themwhat he was fascinated by and ignoring the rest. Sometimes his pictures are more like versions of his own works than representations of Ibsen's ideas. After a chapter of introduction to the astonishing burst of literary and artistic creativity in late nineteenth-century Norway and Ibsen and Munch's place in it, the rest of the book is divided thematically rather than strictly chronologically, which allows for a concentration on individual plays and on different art forms. Chapters 2 and 3 discuss Munch's commissions, the first for Andre Antoine's Theatre de l'CEuvre in 1896-97 and the second for Max Reinhardt's Kammerspiele in 1906-07. For Antoine he produced playbills for...
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