Francis Fergusson

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Francis Fergusson (born February 21, 1904 in Albuquerque , New Mexico , † December 19, 1986 in Princeton (New Jersey) ) was an influential American literary critic , drama and myth theorist and university professor.

Life

Fergusson's father Harvey Butler Fergusson (* 1848) was a classical philology teacher from Alabama . He later became a lawyer, a partner in a New Mexico silver mine, and a member of Congress . Francis' mother Clara Maria Hüning (Americanized: Huning), daughter of Westphalian immigrants to New Mexico, was brought up for a time in Germany until she returned to New Mexico. After the father was not re-elected, he hanged himself in 1915, which plunged Francis into years of deep psychological crisis. He went hungry for four years, leaving a spinal curvature from malnutrition.

Francis Fergusson studied biology and philosophy at Harvard University and for a short time at Oxford . As a student, he became friends with J. Robert Oppenheimer . In Paris he met the influential Sylvia Beach in the bookstore Shakespeare and Company . On his return to New York City , he took acting classes with Richard Boleslawski and wrote theater reviews for the Herald Tribune . In the 1930s he founded the Department of Theater at Bennington College in Vermont , where he directed at least two plays a year . After working there for almost ten years, he went to Indiana University , and later to Rutgers University , where he taught comparative literature . Among his students were the poet Robert Pinsky and the American writer Alan Cheuse (1940-2015). In 1969 he was elected a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences .

After the death of his young wife in 1959, with whom he had two children, he married again.

Fonts

Fergusson's book The Idea of ​​a Theater (1949) is possibly the most influential and widely used book on theater that an American has ever written. The critic Allen Tate compared his main work with Erich Auerbach's Mimesis . Theoretically, Fergusson ties in with the myth theory of James George Frazer , who saw the origin of tragedy in ritual sacrifice (so-called the king must die tragedy, which Fergusson, however, viewed more as a spiritual sacrifice in favor of the people than as a physical sacrifice). The theories of tragedy by Aristotle , Nietzsche , Kenneth Burke and Jacques Maritain also gave him further inspiration.

Fergusson's edition of the Poetics of Aristotle (1961) with commentaries, which he introduced, is also a standard work . In Shakespeare: The Pattern in His Carpet he isolates themes and motifs in Shakespeare's dramas such as B. the monarch as the earthly embodiment of God, romantic love with its both deadly and life-giving magical power or the pair of opposites of fidelity and betrayal. His comments on Dante's Divine Comedy in Dante's Drama of the Mind show the modernity of Dante's poetics as well as his dramatic power and the coherence of the work, in which he sees parallels with Shakespeare. Fergusson's books are easy to read; they are always aimed at laypeople.

Trivia

In 1981 Fergusson appeared in the documentary The Day After Trinity on the life of J. Robert Oppenheimer.

Works

  • The Idea of ​​a Theater: A Study of Ten Plays, The Art of Drama in a Changing Perspective. Princeton University Press, 1968. ISBN 0-691-01288-1 .
  • Trope and Allegory: Themes Common to Dante and Shakespeare . Reprint, University of Georgia Press, 2011.
  • Dante's Drama of the Mind: A Modern Reading of the Purgatorio . Princeton UP, 1953. Book on Demand: Princeton Legacy Library, 2015.
  • Literary Landmarks: Essays on the Theory and Practice of Literature . Rutgers University Press, 1975.
  • Sallies of the Mind . Transaction Publishers, 1997.
  • Shakespeare: The Pattern in His Carpet . Delacorte Press, 1970.
  • as Ed .: Introduction and Notes to Aristotle: Poetics . Hill and Wang, 1961.
  • 'Myth' and the Literary Scruple. In: The Sewanee Review , 64 (1956) 2, pp. 171-185.
  • with Harold Clurman: "On the 'Poetics'", Tulane Drama Review 4 (1960) 4, pp. 23-32.

literature

  • Alan Cheuse (Ed.): The Rarer Action: essays in honor of Francis Fergusson. Rutgers University Press, 1970.
  • John McCormick: Portrait: Francis Fergusson, 1904-1986. In: The American Scholar , 56 (1987) 4, pp. 557-564.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Obituary , nytimes.com, December 21, 1986, accessed February 13, 2020
  2. ↑ John McCormick 1987, p. 557.
  3. ↑ Ben Downing, Daniel Kunitz, Daniel. Robert Pinsky, The Art of Poetry No. 76 , in: Paris Review , Fall 1997
  4. ↑ So u. a. the poet and scholar Wallace Fowlie : Francis Fergusson and "The Idea of ​​a Theater". In: The Sewanee Review . 90 (1982) 1. Pp. 150-158.
  5. ↑ Allen Tate in: Alan Cheuse (Ed.): The Rarer Action: essays in honor of Francis Fergusson. Rutgers University Press, 1970.
  6. ↑ Film info on imdb.com
personal data
SURNAME Fergusson, Francis
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Fergusson, Francis DeLisselin; Fergusson, Francis de Liessline
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American literary scholar and drama theorist
DATE OF BIRTH February 21, 1904
PLACE OF BIRTH Albuquerque , New Mexico
DATE OF DEATH December 19, 1986
Place of death Princeton, New Jersey