Italian Drama

The Dramaturgy of the Spectator explores how Italian theatre consciously adjusted to the emergence of a new kind of spectator who became central to society, politics, and culture in the mid-seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The author argues that while a focus on spectatorship in isolation has value, if we are to understand the broader stakes of the relationship between the power structures and the public sphere as it was then emerging, we must trace step-by-step how spectatorship as a practice was rooted in the social and cultural politics of Italy at the time. By delineating the evolution of the Italian theatre public, as well as the dramatic innovations and communicative techniques developed in an attempt to manipulate the relationship between spectator and performance, this book pioneers a shift in our understanding of audience as both theoretical concept and historical phenomenon.

The grotesque aesthetic lies in two heterogenous elements that line in: the comic and the tragic one, which includes the mysterious, the frightening or even the hideous. From this coupling, and the parallel struggle of the abovementioned elements, disharmony and the sense of paradox are created. Historically, the term grotesque is met at visual arts, when it was given to the phantasmagoric frescoes found in apartments, (grotte: crypts) of Roman buildings in the end of the 15th century. During the 16thcentury, the term is used in Italy to describe the art of painting and the more general artistic culture during which the actual natural symbols decompose and their members are redistributed in an imaginary way. Later, it is included into the new-born art of scenography (stage design), owing to the work of eminent Italian architects, such as Sebastiano Serlio (1475–1554), Bastiano da Sangallo (1481–1551), or Giorgio Vasari (1511–1574), until, reaching out to the 20th century, it is met in the purely Italian theatrical and artistical movement of grottesco, which is also flourishing in Greece.

Keywords: Grotesque, Aesthetic, Visual Arts, Theatre, Italy, Greece

Die Buchreihe Untersuchungen zur deutschen Literaturgeschichte deckt das gesamte Spektrum der germanistischen Literaturforschung ab und umfasst Monographien und Sammelbände über einzelne Epochen vom ausgehenden Mittelalter bis zur Gegenwart. Sie versammelt Beiträge zur Erklärung zentraler Begriffe der Literaturgeschichte, zu einzelnen Autoren und Werken. UNTERSUCHUNGEN ZUR DEUTSCHEN LITERATURGESCHICHTE Der Band erkundet den schöpferisch-interpretativen Spielraum des literarischen Übersetzens in der Goethezeit und beleuchtet ihn aus übersetzungshistorischer und literaturwissenschaftlicher Perspektive. Die Fallstudien historisieren die aus der Übersetzung hervorgegangenen Texte als Teil der deutschen Literaturgeschichte und versuchen, die ihnen inhärenten Gattungs-und Theoriekonzepte zu rekonstruieren.

The reception of the humoristic art of Luigi Pirandello in Greece

        The study deals with the reception of the artistic and cultural power of Luigi Pirandello’s theatrical works in Greece, during the years 1900-2018. In the years following the First World War, Pirandello's plays began to attract an enormous amount of attention in Greece. The word pirandellisme was coined to denote what at the time seemed to be Pirandello's philosophy. The humoristic philosophy of Pirandello was based on the relativity of all things, the unfathomable multiplicity of personality, and a mute skepticism that had an intimate relationship to an overall sentiment of pessimism.
The philosophy of Pirandello’s art still remained in our days a force within the Greek theatre, attracting admiration, criticism and, most important, the attention of new generations of directors and dramatists.

This study aims to reach and illuminate at the first level, dramaturgically and comparatively the librettos of the comedians playwriters of the Italian 18th century Carlo Goldoni and Carlo Gozzi. The Venetians playwriters are two of the "fundamental cornerstones" of world theater history, which affected the work of the modern and

The dramaturgy of Carlo Gozzi is part of the original bloom of fairy-tale
literature, mainly narrative and poetic, in 18th century Europe, the time as
the establishment of the aesthetic of Rococo.
Gozzi wrote his ten drama fairytales by choosing to be free of anything ordinary and common, entering the world of surrealism and dreaming where
the traditional masks of commedia dell’arte meet the nobles, the royals and
the courtiers, the witches, the talking animals and the moving plants.
The condition of transcendence that transpires his drama fairytales, moves
away from the familiar and the usual, embracing the unknown. The elements
of transfiguration and heretopia dominate in his work, as the heroes are often transplanted into animals, plants, strange beings, adopting an-Other self,
perceiving the world differently, having new senses and new abilities, evolving
into something strange to them, to something unfamiliar and often undesirable. The Other Self seeks to find the old identity, wanders on labyrinthine
paths, around the same dynamic point of familiar Ego. The Ego is inadvertently entering the field of the Other, while the Other is part of a Whole, out
and long distance.
Λέξεις-Κλειδιά: θέατρο, Ιταλία, παραμυθόδραμα, ετερότητα
Keywords: theatre, Italy, fairytale drama, otherness

Il saggio propone una riflessione sulla Lehman Trilogy di Stefano Massini e sul romanzo/
ballata che l’ha seguita – Qualcosa sui Lehman – spingendosi fino a riflettere sulla pandemia che
ha travolto il mondo intero nel 2020 e criticando in particolare la speranza di un ritorno alla
normalità. La crisi finanziaria, cominciata col tracollo della celebre banca americana di cui
Massini ricostruisce la genesi come fosse un mito moderno, diventa una sorta di prologo alla
crisi sanitaria che il mondo sta attraversando ed è interpretabile come una concreta
rappresentazione degli orizzonti economici globali e globalizzati.

Die Gattungen des Sprechtheaters entstehen und verändern sich seit der Renaissance kontinuierlich in einem spannungsreichen Prozess der Erneuerung und der historischen Rekonstruktion. Einer re-konstruierenden Tendenz, die auf einen Grundbestand an poetologischen Regeln, Strukturmerkmalen, Inhalten und Aufführungsweisen rekurriert, steht besonders seit dem 20. Jahrhundert eine radikal innovatorische gegenüber, die die dramatischen Gattungen neu ausrichtet oder deren weitverzweigte Traditionen zu neuen Ansätzen nutzt. Diese Trends, die sich auch überlagern können, prägen die zeitgenössischen Aufführungen vom Staatstheater bis zur Kleinbühne – aber auch Produktionen in ‚neuen' Medien (u.a. Film, Hörspiel), welche ihrerseits wiederum das Theater herausfordern. Die Sektion strebt eine Systematisierung der jüngsten Entwicklungen der dramatischen Gattungen in den romanischen Sprachräumen an. Dabei ist auch die – u.a. der unübersichtlichen Forschungslage geschuldete – Auffassung des "anything goes" kritisch zu betrachten. Neben ‚Tragödien' und ‚Komödien', deren Bezeichnung durchaus hinterfragt werden kann, besteht eine Anzahl weiterer, teils experimenteller dramatischer Gattungen, deren Verhältnis zu den klassischen Gattungen zu bestimmen ist. Folgende Problemfelder (und sicherlich weitere) bilden die Sektionsarbeit: Genese, Status quo und ‚Rahmenbedingungen' der traditionellen Gattungen: dramatische Formen und ‚Anti-Formen' (z.B. Sprechtheater vs. avantgardistisches oder postdramatisches Theater), Grenzen der Gattungsbegriffe, kulturelle Differenzen innerhalb des romanischen Sprachraums Dramentheorie, Regelpoetik(en) vs. empirische Poetik(en): Stand der Dramenforschung, Spannungsfeld von Literatur-und Theaterwissenschaft (Balmas, Ubersfeld), Chancen und Grenzen der Theorie in der konkreten Analyse und, vice versa, der Einzeltexte/-aufführungen für die Theoriearbeit Drama als gesellschaftlicher Spiegel? Re-, De-und Konstruktion klassischer Figurenkonstellationen vs. ungeahnte Konstellationen; z.B. Statik und Dynamik tradierter Komödientypen und Tragödienfiguren, Darstellung von Familienbeziehungen post-68 Materieller Rahmen: mediale Differenz vs. Verzahnung von Drama, Film, Hörfunk und anderen Me-dien (z.B. Strukturen und Elemente von Tragödien und Komödien im Film), Aufführungsbedingungen, ökonomischer Druck vs. Kunstanspruch Vorschläge sind in Form eines Abstracts (max. 300 Wörter, PDF) bis zum 15.12.2018 mit dem Betreff "Sektion romanisches Theater" an die Ansprechpartnerin Christiane Müller-Lüneschloß zu richten.

Scholars have long recognized the realism in most of the works of Angelo Beolco, also known as his stage name Ruzante. The dramatic texts whose characters are mainly peasants, farm workers, and soldiers have been seen as sites of protest and the carnivalesque. L’Anconitana, “The Woman from Ancona,” however, has been treated as lightweight comedy. Its Plautine style, its upper-class characters, and the love plot involving cross-dressing is deceptively typical of early modern Italian comedies. Scholars such as Alexandra Coller and Laura Giannetti have interpreted the Tuscan-speaking lovers as positive characters, while Ronnie Ferguson attests that the play has “no city-country or anti-academic polemic.” Yet the “thin bright stripes of anger” identified by Linda Carroll in Beolco’s Plautine comedies are not thin at all. In this paper, I detail the ways in which the realities of the working class are acknowledged in L’Anconitana. I discuss the physical and sexual labor performed by the lower class characters, and contrast it to the exalted forms of labor offered, but not produced, by the upper-class Tuscans. The presentation of the real industry of the servants, Ruzante and Bessa, and the courtesan, Doralice, is more than the use of realism in Beolco’s text – it is a reevaluation of the courtly concept of virtù and how real ingenuity belongs to those working to survive.