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Precarious Figurations focuses on the reception of Shakespeare's
The Merchant of Venice in twentieth- and twenty-first-century
Germany. Looking at theatrical practices and critical or scholarly
discourses from the Weimar Republic to the new millennium, the book
explores why the play has served simultaneously as a vehicle for
the actualization of anti-Semitic tropes and as a staging ground
for the critical exposure of the very logic of anti-Semitism. In
particular, the study investigates how the figure of Shylock has
come to be both a device in and a stumbling block for attempts to
bridge the fundamental rupture in civilization brought about by the
Holocaust. The careful analysis of the German reception of
Merchant, and in particular of the ways of doing and reading
Shylock in the context of painful German, and German-Jewish,
discourses of identity and remembrance, is designed to raise
fundamental questions - questions concerning not only the staging
of Jewishness, the tenacity of anti-Semitism and the difficulties
of Holocaust remembrance, but also the general potentials and
limitations of theatrical interventions into cultural conflicts.
Precarious Figurations focuses on the reception of Shakespeare's
The Merchant of Venice in twentieth- and twenty-first-century
Germany. Looking at theatrical practices and critical or scholarly
discourses from the Weimar Republic to the new millennium, the book
explores why the play has served simultaneously as a vehicle for
the actualization of anti-Semitic tropes and as a staging ground
for the critical exposure of the very logic of anti-Semitism. In
particular, the study investigates how the figure of Shylock has
come to be both a device in and a stumbling block for attempts to
bridge the fundamental rupture in civilization brought about by the
Holocaust. The careful analysis of the German reception of
Merchant, and in particular of the ways of doing and reading
Shylock in the context of painful German, and German-Jewish,
discourses of identity and remembrance, is designed to raise
fundamental questions - questions concerning not only the staging
of Jewishness, the tenacity of anti-Semitism and the difficulties
of Holocaust remembrance, but also the general potentials and
limitations of theatrical interventions into cultural conflicts.
After the breakdown of civilization during the Holocaust,
Shakespeare s Merchant of Venice quickly regained its traditional
position at the forefront of the West German theater scene. Despite
or indeed due to the fact that the piece exhibits problematic
constructions of Jewishness in the figure of the money-lender
Shylock, it became an important reference point and medium of
difficult debates regarding the problem of German hate and German
guilt. This volume discusses important stations of this
contradictory reception history from the perspective of English and
German studies, theater studies and commemorative history
research."
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