Formal technical problems in drama mirror social problems of isolation

Evidence

It was a student of Emil Staiger’s Peter Szondi, influenced by Hegel’s Aesthetics, Lukács’s essay on `The Sociology of Modern Drama’ and Adorno’s Philosophy of Modern Music, who demonstrated in his Theory of Modern Drama (1956) howeven without a theological and messianic point of viewan analysis of the dialectic of form and content in individual works was able to show that the treatment of technical problems within works represented at the same time a reaction to social problems. In sample analyses of plays from Ibsen to Arthur Miller, Szondi, then twenty-five years old, showed how the contradiction between dramatic form and epic subject-matter and between a frame based on dialogic communication and the growing problem of the isolation of individuals ultimately led to a new principle of form in drama. — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 2237

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Szondi showed dramatic formal-dialectical problems mirror social problems; A writer’s formal method determines which social realities remain inaccessible to him — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 784; Szondi’s theory of modern drama tied technical form to social problems. — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 2237 (+3 more)

Broader Connections

• Szondi’s theory of modern drama tied technical form to social problems. #expands (0.80) — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 2237
• A writer’s formal method determines which social realities remain inaccessible to him #expands (0.78) — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 784
• Dramatic irony derives from a gap between reader knowledge and character-deceiving appearances #exemplifies (0.75) — Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious, 3841
• Formal decorative patterns can encode and dream real social contradictions they cannot consciously grasp #expands (0.72) — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 741
• Narration neutralizes subject and object, anticipating utopian reconciliation in its structure #expands (0.72) — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 384