Practicing Progress

by Schade, Richard E.; Sevin, Dieter

• ISBN13: 9789042021464
• ISBN10: 9042021462
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2007-01-31
• Publisher: Brill Rodopi

Summary

The essay reads an Enlightened and modern critique of progress in Mozart's Cos fan tutte. With numerous references to other operas and texts, and with a storyline that emphasizes inevitable, yet mutable aspects of human nature, Cos presents an ambivalent picture of the ways in which even the most disinterested and best-informed attitude toward the past can affect the future. At the same time, the opera seems to embrace the notion of freedom of choice without rejecting tradition or repetition. The essay also comments on the performance of Cos in Zurich in 2000, conducted by Nikolaus Harnoncourt, who often works with authentic period instruments.

Table of Contents

A word about John McCarthy : scholar, teacher, and colleague	p. 9
Introduction to practicing progress : the promise and limitations of enlightenment	p. 13
Bestimmung(en) des Menschen : Zu einem Zentralthema des Aufklarungsdiskurses und einigen seiner Facetten im Umkreis Lessings	p. 21
From evil eye to poetic eye : witch beliefs and physiognomy in the age of enlightenment	p. 35
Enlightenment according to Don Alfonso : perilous progress in Mozart's Cosi fan tutte	p. 59
Casanova's radical enlightenment	p. 75
Economic value-theory and literary culture in late-eighteenth century Germany : the debate over physiocracy	p. 93
The errors of our ways : the relation of literature to culture in Goethe's Faust	p. 109
"Von London und Hannover verlassen" : Germans in America in the eighteenth century	p. 125
Laocoon, Nathan the Wise, and the contexts of their critical reception in nineteenth-century American reviews	p. 153
Dialectic of the biological enlightenment : Nietzsche, degeneration, and eugenics	p. 173
Humanity and its limits : Hannah Arendt reads Lessing	p. 187
The use value of Brecht's enlightenment : revisiting the 1960s in Germany	p. 199
Advancing enlightenment toward ultimate victory : a recent view of Friedrich Nicolai	p. 215
John McCarthy's publications	p. 229
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