@article{witt_2020, title={A 'New' Woman in Verga and Pirandello: From Page to Stage}, volume={115}, ISSN={["2222-4319"]}, DOI={10.5699/modelangrevi.115.2.0479}, journal={MODERN LANGUAGE REVIEW}, author={Witt, Mary Ann Frese}, year={2020}, month={Apr}, pages={479–480} }
 @article{witt_2017, title={The Birth of Theater from the Spirit of Philosophy: Nietzsche and the Modern Drama}, volume={41}, ISSN={["1559-0887"]}, DOI={10.1353/com.2017.0025}, abstractNote={Reviewed by: The Birth of Theater from the Spirit of Philosophy: Nietzsche and the Modern Drama by David Kornhaber Mary Ann Frese Witt David Kornhaber, The Birth of Theater from the Spirit of Philosophy: Nietzsche and the Modern Drama Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 2016. In this well-written and original book, David Kornhaber correctly maintains that Nietzsche's interest in drama and theater has until recently been neglected by scholars. Even most of those who acknowledge an influence of Nietzsche on modern drama tend to see it as philosophical rather than theatrical. Rarely is The Birth of Tragedy read as a text about theater. Kornhaber, highlighting the convergence of philosophy and theater, examines in the first half of the book Nietzsche's profound interest in and debt to drama and theater from The Birth of Tragedy through The Case of Wagner. In the second half, he reads the work of three modern dramatists—Strindberg, Shaw, and O'Neill—in the light of their reception of Nietzsche's theories of the theater. In his thorough and well-informed interpretation of The Birth of Tragedy, along with other early writings by Nietzsche, Kornhaber convincingly demonstrates the young philologist's passionate interest in both drama and performance. Not only did Nietzsche read the classical German drama and theories of theater by Goethe, Schiller, and Lessing, he attended the theater frequently and wrote numerous theater [End Page 371] reviews himself. In The Birth, the actor embodies the Dionysian and the dramatic poet the Apollonian. Drama cannot be separated from performance: both are necessary to the spirit of tragedy. For Kornhaber, "the first tragic philosopher," as Nietzsche called himself, might today be designated a performance theorist. His view of tragedy is also philosophical in that in performance genuine tragedy points toward metaphysical truths that cannot be shown in mere words. Nietzsche's story of the birth of tragedy is also to a large extent concerned with tragedy's demise. Socrates's rationality and Euripides's emphasis on page over stage abandon the Dionysian and thus the crucial metaphysical component of tragedy. In calling for a "music-making Socrates," Nietzsche is also calling for a rebirth of tragedy in Europe in his own time. As is well-known, in 1876 he saw Richard Wagner's opera as hailing this rebirth, only to completely reverse himself a decade later. "I am essentially anti-theatrical," he wrote in The Gay Science in 1887. "I regard the theatre with deep contempt." In The Case of Wagner, Wagner's music-drama appears as a spectacle for the masses. And yet, Kornhaber convincingly argues, Nietzsche's proclaimed anti-theatricality does not signify an abandonment of his essential positions in The Birth. Anti-theatricality, as Martin Puchner has shown, can in fact open the way for a new kind of theater. To a certain extent, Nietzsche considered himself (inspired by Bizet rather than Wagner) as a music-making Socrates, particularly in Thus Spake Zarathustra. Although he disparaged the plays being produced on European stages, he continued to hope for a birth of the modern theater he had envisioned. To what extent did the modern drama by playwrights aware of Nietzsche's writing on theater fulfill his hope for a rebirth of tragedy? The question is probably unanswerable. In his introduction, Kornhaber attempts a very brief survey of modern dramatists under the impact of Nietzsche, mentioning Ibsen, Yeats, Pirandello, and Genet. A broader and more exact survey would have been helpful. There is little to suggest that Pirandello was well-acquainted with Nietzsche's works or wanted to write modern tragedy in a Nietzschean vein. His contemporary Gabriele D'Annunzio, however, read Nietzsche extensively and explicitly attempted to introduce in his own modern tragedies a rebirth of the Dionysian and the Apollonian. Genet was indeed a great admirer of Nietzsche, but the most important French man of the theater to mention would be Antonin Artaud, whom Kornhaber discusses in his Epilogue. Whereas there is no explicit justification for the choice to focus on Strindberg, Shaw, and O'Neill, the chapters on each of them are revealing in that they trace what each dramatist found in reading Nietzsche and how their plays incorporate...}, journal={COMPARATIST}, author={Witt, Mary Ann Frese}, year={2017}, month={Oct}, pages={371–373} }
 @article{witt_2016, title={Extravagance and three other plays}, volume={21}, ISSN={["1469-9583"]}, DOI={10.1080/1354571x.2016.1207338}, abstractNote={The analysis the author devotes to the relationship between tourism and Fascism is among the brightest of the volume. Malia Hom explains with laudable subtlety how the reconciliation of italy’s image – inherited from tradition and tourism – served a function in Fascism’s fabrication of italian imagery. instituting in 1925 the opera Nazionale Dopolavoro, a state recreational organization, the Fascist regime promoted leisure activities, albeit in a Fascist ideological and bureaucratic context. Fascism was thus able to recover the trope ‘the sweet art of idleness’. italy became ‘not just an aesthetic space, a fascistized bel paese, but also a space of leisure such as that imagined by the guidebook tropes il dolce far niente (the sweet art of idleness) and la dolce vita (the sweet life)’ (p. 125). in the third section, ‘spaces’, the author arrives at a key point in this investigation – proposing an apparently provocative observation – quoting Fredric Jameson and Jean Baudrillard: the development of mass tourism in italy, because of its narrative structure (a shape without content, a hyperreal entity), is a phenomenon to be classified as an early form of postmodernism, which has been reproduced until now, mainly outside italy, as in the theme parks and shopping malls of Las vegas or Dubai. The author maintains, ‘These iterations of destination italy not only reveal flashes of truth about the historical formation of the modern italian state but also inspire, if not mandate, the unsettling of such truth in the present’ (p. 212). some might evaluate this definition of certain nineteenth-century italian characteristics as postmodern to be an over-interpretation, reading too far into these travel guides. However, it is difficult to deny that Malia Hom’s work innovates in a way that merits praise, if only for the author’s achievement of combining scientific rigor – the research is very well documented – with a well-guided effort at originality.}, number={4}, journal={JOURNAL OF MODERN ITALIAN STUDIES}, author={Witt, Mary Ann Frese}, year={2016}, month={Sep}, pages={692–694} }
 @article{witt_2015, title={Dramas of the Past on the Twentieth-Century Stage: In History's Wings}, volume={58}, ISSN={["1712-5286"]}, DOI={10.3138/md.2015.58.2.263}, abstractNote={ ABSTRACT: }, number={2}, journal={MODERN DRAMA}, author={Witt, Mary Ann Frese}, year={2015}, pages={263–265} }
 @book{witt_2013, title={Metatheater and modernity: Baroque and neobaroque}, publisher={Madison [N.J.]: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press}, author={Witt, M.}, year={2013} }
 @misc{witt_2011, title={Dramas of culture: Theory, history, performance}, volume={48}, DOI={10.5325/complitstudies.48.2.0263}, abstractNote={Book Review| June 01 2011 Dramas of Culture: Theory, History, Performance Froman, Wayne Jeffrey; John Burt FosterJr.,eds. Dramas of Culture: Theory, History, Performance. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2009. 257 pp. Cloth $60.00, paper $27.95. Mary Ann Frese Witt Mary Ann Frese Witt North Carolina State University Mary Ann Frese Witt is a professor emerita in the Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures at North Carolina State University. She was editor of The Comparatist from 2005–2007. Her recent books include The Search for Modern Tragedy: Aesthetic Fascism in Italy and France (2001) and, as editor and contributor, Nietzsche and the Rebirth of the Tragic (2007). She has published widely on modern European drama and dramatic theory, especially on Pirandello and Genet. Her present research interest involves a reconsideration of metatheater in the seventeenth and twentieth centuries. (maryannfrese@aol.com) Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Comparative Literature Studies (2011) 48 (2): 263–266. https://doi.org/10.5325/complitstudies.48.2.0263 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Tools Icon Tools Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Mary Ann Frese Witt; Dramas of Culture: Theory, History, Performance. Comparative Literature Studies 1 June 2011; 48 (2): 263–266. doi: https://doi.org/10.5325/complitstudies.48.2.0263 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All Scholarly Publishing CollectivePenn State University PressComparative Literature Studies Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. Copyright © 2011 by The Pennsylvania State University. All rights reserved.2011The Pennsylvania State University Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.}, number={2}, journal={Comparative Literature Studies}, author={Witt, M. A. F.}, year={2011}, pages={263–266} }
 @article{witt_2010, title={THE TARGET}, volume={62}, ISSN={["0010-4124"]}, DOI={10.1215/00104124-2009-038}, abstractNote={Book Review| January 01 2010 The Target The Target. By Alain Robbe-Grillet and Jasper Johns. Translated and with an essay by Ben Stoltzfus. Madison: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2006. 115 p. Mary Ann Frese Witt Mary Ann Frese Witt Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Comparative Literature (2010) 62 (1): 100–102. https://doi.org/10.1215/00104124-2009-038 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Mary Ann Frese Witt; The Target. Comparative Literature 1 January 2010; 62 (1): 100–102. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/00104124-2009-038 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search Books & JournalsAll JournalsComparative Literature Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. University of Oregon2010 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.}, number={1}, journal={COMPARATIVE LITERATURE}, author={Witt, Mary Ann Frese}, year={2010}, pages={100–102} }
 @article{witt_2009, title={Babies and Books: Birth as Metaphor in Nietzsche and Pirandello}, volume={6}, ISSN={["1744-1854"]}, DOI={10.3366/E174418540900069X}, abstractNote={The goal of life, according to the band of women in VirginiaWoolf’s short story ‘A Society’, is to produce good people and good books. Yet for all of human history, they observe, these products and their producers have been rigidly separated according to gender. As Clorinda puts it: ‘While we have borne the children, they, we supposed, have borne the books and the pictures. We have populated the world. They have civilized it’.1 She also reasons that since men seem not to have done a particularly good job of civilizing the world, it is perhaps time for women to assume that function. How is this to be accomplished? Perhaps the only solution is to devise a way for men to bear children! Virginia Woolf herself produced several good books but, to her chagrin, no people. If women since her time have, in increasing numbers, been producing both babies and books, the metaphorical division, deeply embedded in Western cultural discourse, between female physical birthgiving and male spiritual birth-giving at some level remains unresolved, as does the problem posed in ‘A Society’. The gender division is what has allowed male writers and artists to appropriate childbirth as metaphor, ‘carrying over’ the female function to their own creative process. As Susan Stanford Friedman has noted in her study of childbirthmetaphors, James Joyce, in reference to Ulysses, wrote to his wife Nora that he had been ‘thinking of the book I have written, the child which I have carried for years and years in the womb of the imagination as you carried in your womb the children you love’.2 A half-century later, in the heyday of feminism, Gunter Grass divided his novel The Flounder (1977) not into chapters but into nine months, corresponding to the time of both}, number={2}, journal={COMPARATIVE CRITICAL STUDIES}, author={Witt, Mary Ann Frese}, year={2009}, pages={183–200} }
 @article{witt_2009, title={From Saint Genesius to Kean: Actors, martyrs, and metatheater}, volume={43}, DOI={10.1353/cdr.0.0044}, abstractNote={Since Lionel Abel published his seminal work in 1963, considerable attention has been paid to metatheater, although there is still no firm consensus on a general definition of the phenomenon. (1) Even though some scholars claim to have found metatheater in antiquity and in non-Western drama, it is generally agreed that the European baroque (late sixteenth through mid-seventeenth century) and modernism (late nineteenth through mid-twentieth century) represent the most important and the most productive periods for a theater that comments on itself through self-conscious awareness of its own theatricality, usually through the medium of a play within the play. Comparatively examining individual plays from these two eras may eventually lead us to a better understanding of both baroque and modernist metatheater. One of the important contributions baroque playwrights made to theater was the introduction of actors as characters, even protagonists, in plays in which they play scenes--a genre that might be considered a subset of metatheater. The actor as character can of course be found in other periods as well, but baroque and modernist plays probe the nature of theater and illusion through these characters as others do not. Luigi Pirandello is the chief modernist example, although his variation might be called the character as actor. Jean-Paul Sartre, not usually thought of as either modernist or metatheatrical, acknowledges Pirandello's influence on his theater and displays his affinities with the baroque in the title of his monumental biography Saint Genet: Comedien et martyr, taken from Jean Rotrou's Le veritable Saint Genest, and in his play Le diable et le bon dieu, adapted from Cervantes's El rufian dichoso. (2) However, it is Sartre's adaptation of Alexandre Dumas's Kean, written just after the publication of Saint Genet, that best exemplifies a twentieth-century metatheatrical rewriting of the actor as saint and martyr as portrayed in Le veritable Saint Genest, itself an adaptation of a play by Lope de Vega. In order to understand Sartre's Kean through Rotrou's Genest, we must first look at Rotrou's models in the legend of Saint Genesius. Although the very existence of Saint Genesius is called into question by the Catholic Encyclopedia, he has a feast day (25 August) and continues to be venerated, especially as the patron saint of actors. (3) According to most accounts, Genesius was not only an actor, but also the equivalent of a director of a troupe of actors. Knowing of Diocletian's antipathy toward Christians, in the persecution of whom Genesius had participated, he prepared a satiric comedy on the subject in honor of the emperor's visit to Rome. While imitating a ceremony of baptism, Genesius suddenly lay down on the stage as if sick, saying that he felt a "great weight" on himself. He then asked to receive baptism in order to die as a Christian. Diocletian, thinking that this was all part of the comedy, laughed. Actors representing a priest and an exorcist came to the actor's side and performed a stage baptism; actors playing soldiers presented the "baptized" Genesius to the emperor to be martyred. Genesius then revealed the truth: while he was being washed with the baptismal water, he had a vision of a company of angels who recited all of his sins from a book, then washed the book clean. He was thus "really" baptized by an angel. Genesius then admonished Diocletian and all present to believe in Jesus Christ, whereupon the enraged emperor ordered him to be beaten and then turned over to Plautian, the prefect of the praetorium, who had him put on the rack, torn with iron hooks, and burned with torches. The martyrdom occurred either in 286 or in 300. It is no surprise that at least since the thirteenth century, Genesius, who discovered truth through illusion, has been the patron saint of actors. His story seems perfectly suited to theatrical adaptation. Of course, the hagiographical legend can be glossed in either a pro- or anti-theatrical manner: Genesius may be seen as saved from the corrupting and sinful milieu of the theater through divine grace, or, on the contrary, the illusionary world of theater might function as the means of his salvation. …}, number={1}, journal={Comparative Drama}, author={Witt, M. A. F.}, year={2009}, pages={19–44} }
 @book{witt_2001, title={The humanities: Cultural roots and continuities (6th ed.)}, ISBN={0618045376}, publisher={Boston, MA : Houghton Mifflin}, author={Witt, M. A. F.}, year={2001} }
 @book{witt_2001, title={The search for modern tragedy: Aesthetic fascism in Italy and France}, ISBN={0801438373}, publisher={Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press}, author={Witt, M. A. F.}, year={2001} }
 @misc{witt_2000, title={Afterword [to Her husband, translation of Luigi Pirandello's Suo marito]}, journal={Her husband}, publisher={Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press}, author={Witt, M. A. F.}, year={2000} }
 @misc{witt_1998, title={I silenzi dei testi e i silenzi della critica, ed. by Carla Locatelli.}, volume={22}, number={1998 May}, journal={Comparatist}, author={Witt, M. A. F.}, year={1998}, pages={196–198} }
 @inbook{witt_1997, title={La patente tra mimesi e diegesi}, booktitle={Pirandello e la sua opera}, publisher={Palermo: Palumbo}, author={Witt, M. A. F.}, year={1997} }
 @book{witt_1993, title={The Humanities: Cultural roots and continuities. (4th ed.)}, ISBN={0669275751}, publisher={Lexington, Mass.: D.C. Heath}, author={Witt, M. A. F?.et al.}, year={1993} }
 @book{witt_1985, title={Existential prisons captivity in mid-twentieth-century French literature}, publisher={Durham: Duke University Press}, author={Witt, Mary Ann Frese}, year={1985} }
 @book{witt_1980, title={The Humanities, cultural roots and continuities}, ISBN={0669014508}, publisher={Lexington, Mass.: D. C. Heath}, author={Witt, M. A. F.}, year={1980} }