Precarious Figurations

Zusatztext

<p><em>Precarious Figurations</em> focuses on the reception of Shakespeares<em>The Merchant of Venice</em> in twentieth- and twenty-first-century Germany. Looking at theatrical practices and critical or scholarly discourses from the Weimar Republic to the new millennium, the book explores why the play has served simultaneously as a vehicle for the actualization of anti-Semitic tropes and as a staging ground for the critical exposure of the very logic of anti-Semitism. In particular, the study investigates how the figure of Shylock has come to be both a device in and a stumbling block for attempts to bridge the fundamental rupture in civilization brought about by the Holocaust. The careful analysis of the German reception of<em>Merchant</em>, and in particular of the ways of doing and reading Shylock in the context of painful German, and German-Jewish, discourses of identity and remembrance, is designed to raise fundamental questions questions concerning not only the staging of Jewishness, the tenacity of anti-Semitism and the difficulties of Holocaust remembrance, but also the general potentials and limitations of theatrical interventions into cultural conflicts.</p>

Autorenportrait

<strong>Zeno Ackermann</strong>, Julius-Maximilian-Universität, Würzburg, Germany;<strong>Sabine Schülting</strong>, Freie Universität Berlin, Germany.

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