Department of Germanic Languages & Literatures University of Toronto
Talk by André Flicker
Title: Voicelessness, Narration, and Documentation: On the Dramatic Agon of Expression in Karl Kraus’s “Die letzten Tage der Menschheit”
Thursday 9 March, 4:00-5:30pm
Odette Hall 323
and on zoom
Image retrieved from: Karl Kraus, Die letzten Tage der Menschheit: Tragödie in fünf Akten mit Vorspiel und Epilog (Wien: Verlag die Fackel, 1922) p. 793.
In this presentation I am analyzing the relationship between documentation and narration as portrayed in Kraus’s First World War drama, Die letzten Tage der Menschheit (1922). I am arguing that documentation is used, first, as an inventory of the horrible events and actions committed during the First World War, and, second, as an expression of the voicelessness and silence, i.e. the inadequacy of narration in its ideologized form as a stylization of the war as adventure to mediate these events.
