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Framing Faust: twentieth-century cultural struggles

2006; Association of College and Research Libraries; Volume: 44; Issue: 01 Linguagem: Inglês

10.5860/choice.44-0070

1943-5975

Inez Hedges,

Theater, Performance, and Music History

Revealing the myth's contributions to structures of power and hegemony. In this interdisciplinary cultural history that encompasses film, literature, music, and drama, Inez Hedges follows the thread of the Faustian rebel in the major intellectual currents of the last hundred years. She presents and his counterpart Mephistopheles as antagonistic - yet complementary - figures whose productive conflict was integral to such phenomena as the birth of narrative cinema, the rise of modernist avant-gardes before World War II, and feminist critiques of Western cultural traditions. Framing Faust: Twentieth-Century Cultural Struggles pursues a dialectical approach to cultural history. Using the probing lens of cultural studies, Hedges shows how claims to the Faustian legacy permeated the struggle against Nazism in the 1930s while infusing not only the search for socialist utopias in Russia, France, and Germany, but also the quest for legitimacy on both sides of the Cold War divide after 1945. Hedges balances new perspectives on such well-known works as Thomas Mann's Dr Faustus and Jack Kerouac's Dr Sax with discussions of previously over-looked twentieth-century expressions of the myth, including American film noir and the films of Stan Brakhage. She evaluates musical compositions - Hanns Eisler's libretto, the opera Votre by Henri Pousseur and Michel Butor, and Alfred Schnittke's Cantata - as well as works of fiction and drama in French and German, many of which have heretofore never been discussed outside narrow disciplinary confines. Enhanced by twenty-four illustrations, Framing Faust provides a fascinating and focused narrative of some of the major cultural struggles of the past century as seen through the Faustian prism and establishes as an important present-day frame of reference.