Charles Explorer logo
🇬🇧

The Apology of Sliding Movement : On the Play and Steppenwolf

Publication at Faculty of Humanities |
2017

Abstract

The very centre of the submitted dissertation is the philosophical interpretation of Hermann Hesse's novel Der Steppenwolf; however, in its entirety it represents an effort to display the broader context of a literary work. Therefore, its constituent part is the thematization of the play as a philosophical problem (including the question of understanding world and oneself in terms of insight into the rules of the game) as well as an account of the artistic creativity with reference to the concept of mimesis and an exposition of such an practice of interpretation, which is neither a commentary nor a translation of the content, but which consists in displaying the movement of amplification.

The first part of this dissertation comprises an philosophical analysis of the concept of play/game with regard to its basic characteristics, aspects, forms (especially with regard to its extreme form, i.e. the carnival), and peculiarities of play's own movement - in the sense of the sliding over the reality. The second part exposes the possibilities of the interpretation of the aforementioned Hesse's novel, following by means of the ,optics of play's movement' different constitutive moments of this text with regard to its chronology.

The main ,chronotope' is the ,being on confines', that is being on the threshold, in the time of the feast, referring to the openess as the ,unconditioned hospitality' for the world's alterity. Broader frame of interpretation allows to consider several motives of the sliding movement, of the heterotopia of the mirror in the ,magical theatre' and other things.