Search

3 results

The Birth of Tragedy in Twentieth-Century Literature and Thought
Adam Lecznar
Published online:

27 March 2020

Print publication:

16 April 2020
- Book
- - Get access
    
    Buy a print copy
    
    Check if you have access via personal or institutional login
    
    Log in Register
- Export citation
Dionysus after Nietzsche examines the way that The Birth of Tragedy (1872) by Friedrich Nietzsche irrevocably influenced twentieth-century literature and thought. Adam Lecznar argues that Nietzsche's Dionysus became a symbol of the irrational forces of culture that cannot be contained, and explores the presence of Nietzsche's Greeks in the diverse writings of Jane Harrison, D. H. Lawrence, Martin Heidegger, Richard Schechner and Wole Soyinka (amongst others). From Jane Harrison's controversial ideas about Greek religion in an anthropological modernity, to Wole Soyinka's reimagining of a postcolonial genre of tragedy, each of the writers under discussion used the Nietzschean vision of Greece to develop subversive discourses of temporality, identity, history and classicism. In this way, they all took up Nietzsche's call to disrupt pre-existing discourses of classical meaning and create new modes of thinking about the Classics that speak to the immediate concerns of the present.

Chapter 2 - Nietzsche: The Birth of Tragedy
- By Raymond Geuss
Edited by Robert Pippin, University of Chicago
Book:

Introductions to Nietzsche

Published online:

05 June 2012

Print publication:

09 February 2012, pp 44-66
- Chapter
- - Get access
    
    Check if you have access via personal or institutional login
    
    Log in Register
- Export citation
Summary

The Birth of Tragedy was one of the last and most distinguished contributions to a Central European debate about the ills of modern society. The argument in the Friedrich Nietzsche's text falls into roughly three parts. The first part describes the origin of tragedy in ancient Greece as the outcome of a struggle between two forces, principles, or drives. The second part of Nietzsche's text describes how the balance is upset by the arrival of a new force, principle, or drive, which Nietzsche associated with Socrates. The final part of the text describes the modern state of crisis in which they are being forced to realize the limits of the Socratic culture and the high price they have had to pay for it. As Nietzsche himself points out in the introduction to the second edition, The Birth of Tragedy is a work of Romanticism.

Chapter 1 - Nietzsche: Writings from the early notebooks
- By Alexander Nehamas
Edited by Robert Pippin, University of Chicago
Book:

Introductions to Nietzsche

Published online:

05 June 2012

Print publication:

09 February 2012, pp 17-43
- Chapter
- - Get access
    
    Check if you have access via personal or institutional login
    
    Log in Register
- Export citation
Summary

This chapter considers three topics that preoccupied Friedrich Nietzsche during the years when he was thinking about, and writing, The Birth of Tragedy and, in one way or another, during most of the rest of the 1870s: the philosophy of Arthur Schopenhauer, the music of Richard Wagner, and the importance of ancient Greek art and civilisation for a renaissance of German culture. The chapter discusses a few specific issues relevant both to Nietzsche's notes and to his published works in order to indicate the various ways in which each kind of writing can cast light on the other. The notes are divided into three sub-periods, corresponding, roughly, with his writing The Birth of Tragedy, the Untimely Meditations and Human, All Too Human. Nietzsche's notes of the time reveal his increasing interest in philosophical problems of metaphysics and epistemology as well as in the history of Greek philosophy.