History Seminar Series this Friday

Nipissing University’s History department is pleased to announce the second discussion in the History Seminar Series titled Embodied Re-imaginings: Greek Tragedy, Nietzsche, and German Expressionist Theatre featuring Dr. Paul Monaghan, on Friday October 3, in room R308.
Here is an abstract:
In this presentation, Dr. Monaghan argues that the “new” theatre ideals and practices developed by the German Expressionists, with which they attempted to transform the catastrophe that was their immediate past and present, were explicitly modelled on their “re-imagining” of Greek theatrical practice. The Expressionists’ re-imagining of tragedy was given its intensely “embodied” inflection by their very selective interpretation of Nietzsche’s own “productive reception” of Greek tragedy and philosophy that had been forged in his early study of the “tragic age” of Greece (encompassing myth, Pre-Socratic philosophy and tragedy). The disparate strands of Expressionist theatre were held together by a fervent belief in the power of the actor’s heightened physical expression to spiritually transform the audience and German society, a notion directly influenced by Nietzsche’s Dionysian principle and the ecstatic affirmation of life encapsulated in his doctrine of “eternal return”. Furthermore, Dr. Monaghan argues that Expressionist productions and adaptations of specific Greek tragedies constituted an important testing ground for what then developed more widely into central features of Expressionist theatrical practice. Both the general reception of tragedy and its Nietzschean slant amounted to an “embodied re-imagining” and transformation of the ancient Greek model.