Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Griffiths, Elystan

Titel

GENDER, LAUGHTER, AND THE DESECRATION OF ENLIGHTENMENT: KLEIST'S PENTHESILEA AS 'HUNDEKOMÖDIE'

Ist Teil von

• Modern Language Review, 2009-04, Vol.104 (2), p.453-471

Ort / Verlag

Belfast: Maney Publishing

Erscheinungsjahr

2009

Quelle

Project Muse All Journals

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• The article reads Kleist's play Penthesilea (1808) against the nexus of discourses of Enlightenment and gender. It proposes that the Greeks represent views that Kleist had espoused in his youth, but that these are not only the target of some comedy, but are shown to cause ongoing detriment to the Amazon state. The play is interpreted as an attack upon both Enlightenment rationalism and the humanist impulses of Weimar Classicism. This attack entails a reassessment of language as a medium of human communication and historical progress, which is expressed both in and through the language of the play.