Friedrich Schiller: Crime, Aesthetics, And The Poetics Of Punishment
by Gail Kathleen Hart
Category: Literary Criticism

This study traces Schiller's admiration for aberrants to his own "incarceration" in Duke Carl Eugen of Wurttemberg's highly regulated Hohe Karlsschule. Schiller's escape, the illicit flight that followed the criminalization of his writing, culminated in the programmatic "Die Schaubuhne als moralische Anstalt betrachtet" (The Dramatic Stage as a Moral Institution), in which he opposes the stage to the absolutist state as a viable and preferable counter-regime. Subsequent chapters follow the progress of Schiller's aspirations to Wirkung, or theatrical/pedagogical efficacy, as beneficial impulse and coercive force in his aesthetic confrontations with crime and its consequences. A final chapter addresses Schillerian intertextuality in the twentieth century, and the survival of Schillerian ideals of freedom and aesthetic education in modern mutations. Foremost among these texts are Anthony Burgess's A Clockwork Orange and Stanley Kubrick's film of that novel.