Marianne Kesting

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Marianne Kesting (born March 16, 1930 in Bochum ) is a German literary scholar ( comparativeist ) and literary critic .

life and work

Marianne Kesting passed her Abitur in 1950 in Wetter an der Ruhr and initially studied violin and music at the Freiburg University of Music . In 1953 she began studying modern German , music and theater studies in Munich , which she completed with a doctorate in 1957 . Her dissertation dealt with the epic theater . Together with Tankred Dorst , she edited the workbooks section in the collection theater series of the Kiepenheuer & Witsch publishing house in the 1960s . After a long work as a theater , literary and art critic , since 1963 as head of the literature department of the Hessian Radio , and stays in Rome and Paris habilitated Marianne Kesting 1971 in Cologne and took 1,972 first a call to the University of Bielefeld , before they 1975 followed a call to the chair for general and comparative literature at the Ruhr University Bochum . In 1995 Marianne Kesting retired in Bochum. She is a member of the PEN Center Germany .

Marianne Kesting's biography of Bertolt Brecht , published in 1959, achieved widespread circulation , and it still fed on his own view of Brecht's work in the Berliner Ensemble in East Berlin in the post-war period. In addition to other books, she has written numerous articles and features in the specialist and public press as well as for the radio . She thus embodies a literary study that maintains critical contact with contemporary literature and art . Marianne Kesting's scientific and critical contributions converge in the project of a theory of modernity in the narrower literary , but also in the broader aesthetic sense:

"Perhaps in future years the great revolutionary movement of modern aesthetics, which often wants to appear to us as a complex jumble of individual currents, directions and conceptions, will one day be perceived as an intellectual building that is constructed according to precisely diagnosable large plans." ( Measurement of the labyrinth , 1965)

Following this program, she has presented a series of widely acclaimed, far-reaching treatises , such as her essays on emptiness and whiteness and on the living portrait .

Marianne Kesting is the sister of the sociologist Hanno Kesting , who died in 1975 , with whom she exchanged ideas. His intellectual mentor, Carl Schmitt, tried to justify his (Schmitt's) role in National Socialism by allegorically referring to Herman Melville's story Benito Cereno . As a result, Marianne Kesting worked out a documentary on the history of the slave trade in America as well as a reception history and historical-philological analysis of Melville's text in discussion and personal contact with Schmitt .

Publications (selection)

  • Bertolt Brecht in self-testimonies and photo documents. Rowohlt, Hamburg 1959 (37th edition 1998, ISBN 978-3-499-50037-4 ).
  • The epic theater. On the structure of modern drama. W. Kohlhammer, Stuttgart 1959 (8th edition 1989, ISBN 978-3-17-010641-3 ).
  • Panorama of contemporary theater. 50 literary portraits. R. Piper, Munich 1962 (revised and expanded new edition 1969).
  • Measurement of the maze. Studies on modern aesthetics. S. Fischer, Frankfurt am Main 1965.
  • Discovery and Destruction. To the structural transformation of the arts. Fink, Munich 1970.
  • In search of reality. Critical writings on modern literature. R. Piper, Munich 1972, ISBN 3-492-01934-X - table of contents (PDF; 0.1 MB) .
  • Herman Melville : Benito Cereno. Complete text of the story (translated by W. E. Süskind ). Documentation. Ullstein, Frankfurt am Main / Berlin / Vienna 1972, ISBN 3-548-03932-4 (2nd, extended edition Insel, Frankfurt am Main 1983, ISBN 3-458-32344-9 ).
  • The dictatorship of photography. From imitating art to overpowering it. R. Piper, Munich / Zurich 1980, ISBN 978-3-492-02592-8 .

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ See also Marianne Kesting: book review. In: Criticism in the mass media. Objective criteria or subjective evaluation? Edited by Heinz-Dietrich Fischer . Deutscher Ärzte-Verlag, Cologne 1983, pp. 217-235.
  2. ↑ Karlheinz Stierle : attempt on a reader. In: The risk of modernity. Festschrift for Marianne Kesting. Edited by Paul Gerhard Klussmann, Willy Richard Berger, Burkhard Dohm. Lang, Frankfurt am Main a. a. 1993, pp. 9-12, here p. 9.
  3. ↑ 1st to 37th edition (1998): 371,000 copies (according to DNB ).
  4. ↑ For example Marianne Kesting: The Reality of Fiction. On the work of Samuel Beckett . In: Deutschlandfunk , January 24, 1974, 9:30 am to 10:00 am (Editor: Wolfgang Pehnt , Literature Department).
  5. ^ Marianne Kesting: Measurement of the labyrinth. Studies on modern aesthetics. S. Fischer, Frankfurt am Main 1965, p. 5 ( foreword ).
  6. ↑ Marianne Kesting: The horror of the void. On the metaphor of the color white in Poe , Melville and Mallarmé . In: Discovery and Destruction. To the structural transformation of the arts. Fink, Munich 1970, pp. 94-122; French in: Romantisme 2,4 (1972), pp. 20-36 (PDF; 1.4 MB) ; Marianne Kesting: Comments on the imagery of the color white in modern poetry and painting. In: The foreign word: Studies on the interdependence of texts. Festschrift for Karl Maurer on his 60th birthday. Edited by Ilse Nolting-Hauff , Joachim Schulze . B. R. Grüner, Amsterdam 1988, pp. 343-357.
  7. ^ Marianne Kesting: The living portrait. In: Athenaeum. Jahrbuch für Romantik 3 (1993), pp. 27–54 (PDF; 3.2 MB) .
  8. ↑ Marianne Kesting to Hannah Arendt , April 23, 1974 (JPG; 0.7 MB) (facsimile on The Hannah Arendt Papers of the Library of Congress ).
  9. ↑ See Marianne Kesting: Melville's “Benito Cereno”. In: Herman Melville: Benito Cereno. Full text of the narration. Documentation. Ullstein, Frankfurt am Main / Berlin / Vienna 1972, pp. 109-134, here pp. 131 ff .; Marianne Kesting: Encounters with Carl Schmitt. In: Schmittiana 4 (1994), pp. 93-118.
  10. ↑ Thomas O. Beebee: Carl Schmitt's Myth of Benito Cereno. In: seminar 42,2 (May 2006), pp. 114–134, here pp. 124 f.
personal data
SURNAME Kesting, Marianne
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German literary scholar
DATE OF BIRTH March 16, 1930
PLACE OF BIRTH Bochum