Don Juan: eine Tragödie. Faustian intertextuality and tragic rewriting in E. T. A. Hoffmann's tale

  • Francesco Marola Università di Roma 'Tor Vergata'
Keywords: Don Juan, Faust, E. T. A. Hoffmann, Literary Myth, Romanticism,

Abstract

The literary myth of don Juan, arose in the comedy, is reformulated in the direction of the tragic around 1800. The transformation begins with the Mozart-Da Ponte’s opera and finds fulfillment in Hoffmann’s tale, which projects the new tragic tone of the Mozartian finale on the whole myth. The purpose of the paper is to highlight the presence in the Don Juan of many intertextual references to Goethe’s Faust, not fully noticed by critics so far, through which it is possible to read such tragic rewritingas a declared synthesis of the two myths, where don Juan takes the role of Faust-Mephistopheles and donna Anna that of Gretchen. The rewriting of the myth culminates in the final mirroring of the narrator in Anna-Gretchen. But the value of the tragic is relativized in Hoffmann by the ironic self-consciousness of the romantic artist: confined to the fantastic world of art, it is meaningless in the prosaic reality of the bourgeois life.

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Published
2017-11-30
How to Cite
Marola, F. (2017). Don Juan: eine Tragödie. Faustian intertextuality and tragic rewriting in E. T. A. Hoffmann’s tale. Between, 7(14). https://doi.org/10.13125/2039-6597/2781
Section
At the Origins of Modernity