Framing Faust: Twentieth-Century Cultural Struggles Book

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 Faust 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 reveals how the myth applies to contemporary structures of power and hegemony. She 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 overlooked twentieth-century expressions of the Faust myth, including American film noir, the Faust films of Stan Brakhage, Révolutions pour plus d?un Faust, by Hélène Cixous, István Szabó?s Mephisto, Frank Wedekind?s Franziska, and Else Lasker-Schüler?s post-Holocaust drama Ichundich. She evaluates musical compositions?Hanns Eisler?s Faust libretto, the opera Votre Faust by Henri Pousseur and Michel Butor, and Alfred Schnittke?s Faust 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. Framing Faust boldly explores the role the Faust story played in silent film, arguing that it was so frequently adapted for the screen that it helped to establish the place of cinema in the public sphere in France, Germany, and the United States. She also provides in-depth analyses of the notions of self, identity, and the masquerade that resurface in many reworkings of the Faust story, from feminism to the anti-Faust figures of the European avant-garde. 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 Faust as an important present-day frame of reference. In the end, Hedges argues that the embodiment of Faust as rebel and Mephistopheles as dissident can offer a utopian vision of hope. "Framing Faust traces the Faust motif as it is appropriated in a variety of twentieth-century settings and media. The text presents little-known material and contributes new twists in understanding familiar material. Hedges?s scholarship is superior?painstaking and extremely wide-ranging and indicates sovereignty in a number of areas. She combines close reading with extremely impressive research across a number of linguistic barriers, aesthetic genre, and media. The result is a work that presents a wide compendium of material demonstrating that the Faust motif is prevalent throughout twentieth-century Western culture. An important work in view of the material investigated and the potential import of the argument, Framing Faust is both scholarly and readable, no small feat." ?John Davidson, author of Deterritorializing the New German Cinema "Framing Faust convinces readers that the Faustian myth is a hegemonic myth of the twentieth century. Fitting into a variety of well-researched cultural and ideological contexts, the text expands received notions of what the Faust myth might signify for Western culture. Clearly written and organized, Framing Faust is a useful tool for the classroom." ?Brigitte Peucker, author of Incorporating Images: Film and the Rival ArtsRead More