Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Note on the Abbreviations
- Introduction: Max Frisch in the Twenty-First Century
- 1 Max Frisch's Early Plays
- 2 Spielraum in Max Frisch's Graf Öderland and Don Juan: Transparency as Mode of Performance
- 3 Max Frisch's Biedermann und die Brandstifter and Die große Wut des Philipp Hotz
- 4 Max Frisch's Andorra: Balancing Act between Pattern and Particular
- 5 Eternal Recurrence in Life and Death in Max Frisch's Late Plays
- 6 Max Frisch's Early Fiction
- 7 From Life to Literature: Max Frisch's Tagebücher
- 8 “Writing in order to be a stranger to oneself”: Max Frisch's Stiller
- 9 Cybernetic Flow, Analogy, and Probability in Max Frisch's Homo Faber
- 10 The Ends of Blindness in Max Frisch's Mein Name sei Gantenbein
- 11 Max Frisch's Montauk. Eine Erzählung
- 12 Man, Culture, and Nature in Max Frisch's Der Mensch erscheint im Holozän
- 13 “My life as a man. Everyman”: Max Frisch's Blaubart. Erzählung
- 14 Max Frisch's Essays and Speeches
- Frisch's Major Works
- Select Bibliography
- Notes on the Contributors
- Index
14 - Max Frisch's Essays and Speeches
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 December 2013
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Note on the Abbreviations
- Introduction: Max Frisch in the Twenty-First Century
- 1 Max Frisch's Early Plays
- 2 Spielraum in Max Frisch's Graf Öderland and Don Juan: Transparency as Mode of Performance
- 3 Max Frisch's Biedermann und die Brandstifter and Die große Wut des Philipp Hotz
- 4 Max Frisch's Andorra: Balancing Act between Pattern and Particular
- 5 Eternal Recurrence in Life and Death in Max Frisch's Late Plays
- 6 Max Frisch's Early Fiction
- 7 From Life to Literature: Max Frisch's Tagebücher
- 8 “Writing in order to be a stranger to oneself”: Max Frisch's Stiller
- 9 Cybernetic Flow, Analogy, and Probability in Max Frisch's Homo Faber
- 10 The Ends of Blindness in Max Frisch's Mein Name sei Gantenbein
- 11 Max Frisch's Montauk. Eine Erzählung
- 12 Man, Culture, and Nature in Max Frisch's Der Mensch erscheint im Holozän
- 13 “My life as a man. Everyman”: Max Frisch's Blaubart. Erzählung
- 14 Max Frisch's Essays and Speeches
- Frisch's Major Works
- Select Bibliography
- Notes on the Contributors
- Index
Summary
Literary scholars and critics have not discussed Max Frisch's essays and speeches in a comprehensive manner yet, even though they constitute a considerable part of his prose texts and develop thematic threads found throughout the fabric of his work. the recipient of numerous literary prizes, Frisch used the genre of award acceptance speeches to reflect on creative tensions between aesthetic curiosity and ethical responsibility. His essays and speeches can be read as one continuous text throughout which Frisch juxtaposes the conflicting but mutually enriching voices of the writer as an artist whose projects are playfully open-ended and a concerned global citizen who discusses world affairs. While Frisch's essays inhabit a border zone between artistic exploration and political engagement, he disliked the notion of littérature engagée.
It is impossible to discuss the full range of Frisch's essayistic work and his speeches in this chapter. the following discussions focus on Frisch's central thematic clusters: the ethics and poetics of writing and theater, global and Swiss politics, and existential questions of death and hope.
On Literature and Political Activism
Beginning in the 1930s, Frisch's essays explore the relationship of epistemic desire and the art of the narrative, as well as an anthropological condition that he calls, in the title of an essay published in 1960, “Unsere Gier nach Geschichten” (Our Greed for Stories). For Frisch, literature embodies at once a continuous, open-ended aesthetic experiment and a medium for undogmatic political engagement.
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- A Companion to the Works of Max Frisch , pp. 220 - 228Publisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2013