Momentum Dramaticum: Festschrift for Eckehard Catholy

Roman S. Struc is a professor of Germanic and Slavic Studies at the
University of Calgary.

This work’s title was wisely selected. The bulk of the book, published
to honor the now-retired University of Toronto professor Eckehard
Catholy, deals expressly with German drama, while the rest consists of
contributions concerning the dramatic as such, whether in drama,
fiction, or other literary genres. This approach makes the volume even
more valuable, since the book deals with the dramatic as a universal
phenomenon but also treats its specific manifestations.

Since the book contains more than 30 contributions, each richly
deserving of critical attention, the reviewer can merely point to
trends, tendencies, and focuses. The volume begins with a theoretical
essay on the linguistic aspect of the dramatic, followed by five
articles on various aspects of the dramatic in medieval literature from
the Tagelied to Osterspiel. The next six essays focus on the eighteenth
century, ranging from the drama and comedy of the Enlightenment to what
could be called the dramatic productions of pre-Romanticism. “From
Classicism to Realism” contains three articles discussing the drama of
this transitional period; and under the general heading “Drama in
Prose,” four authors write on the dramatic in the novel and other
narrative genres, primarily from a theoretical point of view. The next
four essays, under the title “The Dramatic in Modern Prose,” single
out the dramatic components of modern, and not-so-modern, fiction. The
final section, “Modern Drama,” contains nine essays ranging from
Bьechner to Dьerrenmatt and from discussions of individual works to
the more general problem of the Wirkungsgeschichte of such figures as
Brecht.

The variety of material in this volume makes for lively reading.
However, the book exhibits a drawback common to all Festschriften.
Although Momentum Dramaticum uses the dramatic as its common
denominator, this unifying principle is not always brought out. Perhaps
the essays should have been selected much more rigorously so as to truly
reflect the intentions expressed in the title. Also surprising and
disappointing is that there is not a single essay on baroque drama.