The modern individual in Shakespeare and Goethe

• Grant number: 07/03905-3
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships in Brazil - Scientific Initiation
• Start date: August 01, 2007
• End date: July 31, 2008
• Field of knowledge: Linguistics, Literature and Arts - Literature - Modern Foreign Literatures
• Principal Investigator: Wilma Patricia Marzari Dinardo Maas
• Grantee: Rafhael Borgato
• Host Institution: Faculdade de Ciências e Letras (FCL). Universidade Estadual Paulista (UNESP). Campus de Araraquara. Araraquara , SP, Brazil

Abstract

The project aims at identifying the reception of Shakespeare among German literature in the 18th Century. This reception takes place between a classical and neoclassical point of view as in Gottsched opposed to a brand new modernity as in Lessing. The efforts of Lessing towards a "bourgeois tragedy" shall be incorporated by Goethe in his attempt to build up a German national theater, as well as by the first romantic generations. The influence of Shakespeare shall expand towards a new concept of human being raised on a new kind of cultural and social context brought by the bourgeoisie. Throughout the paradoxal character represented in Hamlet we intend to apprehend the intensification of the contradictory individual thought amidst modernity. Our main goal is thus to identify, historical and aesthetically, the transition from an aristocratic literary production to a new literature, based on the ideals of the bourgeoisie.