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Goethes Faust: Erster und zweiter Teil : Grundlagen, Werk, Wirkung
German
- GenresGerman Literature
Perfect Paperback
First published January 1, 2001
1 person want to read
About the author
Jochen Schmidt
127 books11 followersJochen Schmidt ist 1970 in Berlin geboren und lebt dort. Er liest jede Woche in der "Chaussee der Enthusiasten". Er arbeitet auch als Journalist für die "SZ", "FAZ", "taz" und andere.
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Displaying 1 of 1 review
June 15, 2020
Jochen Schmidt's critical analysis of Goethe's Faust is a useful study and interpretation of the work that is significantly disfigured by its single-mindedness. I am not familiar with the author's CV, but he seems more familiar with historical and critical material than with literature, and that often results in his over-reliance on the particular frames that he wishes to emphasize in his study. For example, he appears to knows the early modern Faust literature well, but he misses or doesn't note crucial references to Dante's Commedia, which also exerted a profound influence on Goethe's work.
Schmidt shows himself to be out of his element when confronted with mythological, religious, or depth psychological material, which is a pretty stunning deficiency when dealing with a work like Faust. His analysis of the second part of the tragedy in particular is greatly deformed by his insistence on interpreting the work solely as a kind of allegory for the cultural evolution of Europe from the Middle Ages to modernity, with Faust himself as an avatar of modernity. I am not unsympathetic to that reading, but it is quite obviously only one dimension of the complex work, and by no means necessarily the most important one.
Relying so heavily on that interpretive framework puts him in the unenviable position of asserting that the entire Classical Walpurgisnacht scene can be dealt with in a critical interpretation with a single paragraph that describes it as a catalog of artistically-productive Renaissance images. That is comically inadequate for dealing with a scene that runs for 1400 lines - by far the longest, and more than 10% of the entire work.
I would add that the complex allegorical and symbolic content in that bewildering scene is clearly the most in need of critical elucidation. Schmidt's failure to meaningfully treat it is a very significant problem.
Errors of omission aside, the content that does exist is generally strong. Within his chosen parameters, Schmidt is an excellent and intelligent reader, and provides a useful supplement to the reader of Goethe's masterpiece.
Schmidt shows himself to be out of his element when confronted with mythological, religious, or depth psychological material, which is a pretty stunning deficiency when dealing with a work like Faust. His analysis of the second part of the tragedy in particular is greatly deformed by his insistence on interpreting the work solely as a kind of allegory for the cultural evolution of Europe from the Middle Ages to modernity, with Faust himself as an avatar of modernity. I am not unsympathetic to that reading, but it is quite obviously only one dimension of the complex work, and by no means necessarily the most important one.
Relying so heavily on that interpretive framework puts him in the unenviable position of asserting that the entire Classical Walpurgisnacht scene can be dealt with in a critical interpretation with a single paragraph that describes it as a catalog of artistically-productive Renaissance images. That is comically inadequate for dealing with a scene that runs for 1400 lines - by far the longest, and more than 10% of the entire work.
I would add that the complex allegorical and symbolic content in that bewildering scene is clearly the most in need of critical elucidation. Schmidt's failure to meaningfully treat it is a very significant problem.
Errors of omission aside, the content that does exist is generally strong. Within his chosen parameters, Schmidt is an excellent and intelligent reader, and provides a useful supplement to the reader of Goethe's masterpiece.
Displaying 1 of 1 review