2023-07-08, Kellermann, Jonas

This article reads the resurrected Catelyn Stark, also known as Lady Stoneheart, in George R. R. Martin’s series of fantasy novels A Song of Ice and Fire, as a spectral adaptation of female silence in the works of William Shakespeare, especially of Hermione in The Winter’s Tale. Like Hermione, Catelyn experiences the loss of her son, dies herself shortly thereafter, and miraculously returns from the dead as a stone-like, voiceless figure. Yet, unlike Hermione, resurrection transforms Catelyn into a merciless embodiment of vengeance, whose grotesque appearance and persona shed a provocative new light on the representation of maternal grief and misogynist violence in Shakespearean drama. Hermione’s ambivalent silence at the end of The Winter’s Tale thus takes on an unequivocal tone of rage in her contemporary specter. Lady Stoneheart also exemplifies the adaptational tension between Martin’s series and the TV show Game of Thrones, in the latter of which Lady Stoneheart—while being absent—still maintains a haunting discursive presence.

2021, Kellermann, Jonas

Der vorliegende Aufsatz vergleicht Shakespeares Romanze The Winter’s Tale in generischer und dramaturgischer Hinsicht mit der choreographischen Adaptation des Dramas durch Christopher Wheeldon für das Royal Ballet aus dem Jahr 2014. Der Vergleich offenbart dabei zahlreiche formtheoretische Verbindungspunkte, die über die rein inhaltliche Ebene hinausgehen. Während Shakespeares Stück von mehreren Paradoxien gezeichnet ist, welche seinen dezidiert antiquierten Status als Romanze herausstellen, überträgt Wheeldons Adaptation diese Charakteristika in das tänzerische Spannungsfeld zwischen dem romantischen ballet d’action des neunzehnten Jahrhunderts und dem Literaturballett des zwanzigsten und einundzwanzigsten Jahrhunderts. Beide Werke lassen sich somit als old tales lesen, die formal wie inhaltlich das Erbe tradierter Kunstformen wie der antiken und mittelalterlichen Romanze oder des klassischen Handlungsballetts fortführen, diese aber zugleich auch aus zeitgenössischer Perspektive hinterfragen und erneuern. Zudem eröffnet Wheeldons Ballett einen aus adaptationstheoretischer Sicht interessanten rückwärts gerichteten Blick auf Shakespeares frühneuzeitliches Drama.

2019, Kellermann, Jonas

2017, Kellermann, Jonas

Der Aufsatz beschäftigt sich mit Shakespeares Verwendung katholischer Ikonographie im Sonett, welches Romeo und Julia bei ihrer ersten Begegnung in Akt 1 spontan komponieren. Die religiöse Bildsprache geht dabei weit über die von Petrarca geprägten und in der Renaissance kopierten generischen Konventionen hinaus und erfüllt eine zentrale Rolle für die tragische Dimension des Stücks. Die Verbildlichung der Liebenden als Pilger und Heilige ruft nicht nur Assoziationen quasireligiöser Transzendenz hervor. Sie ermöglicht den Figuren auch einen Moment gegenseitiger Selbsterkennung, auf dem ihr amouröses Verhältnis aufbauen wird. Romeo und Julia verortet die intensiven Gefühlswelten der Hauptfiguren somit im Zwischenspiel von Körper, Geist, und Sprache, und zeigt somit die Produktivität von Ansätzen aus dem Bereich der Affekttheorie auf, um die Dramatisierung von Affekten in literarischen Werken zu diskutieren.

2021, Kellermann, Jonas

This article explores the controversial reception of Hanya Yanagihara’s A Little Life (2015) through the framework of trauma theory. The polarizing novel earned both acclaim and contempt for its extreme portrayal of sexual abuse in the protagonist Jude’s childhood and the haunting effect thereof on him as a self-harming adult. For many readers, the excessive amount of violence and the highly emotional tone of the novel simply became ‘too much to bear’. Contextualizing Yanagihara’s novel within current discourses on literary trauma, I argue that the book deliberately textualizes the affective incommensurability of Jude’s trauma into its melodramatically exuberant form and content. Negotiating between emphatic proximity and distance, Yanagihara enforces unto the reader a form of compassionate witnessing that may be too close for comfort and dares its witnesses to respond in an equally extreme manner. A Little Life thus opens up a thought-provoking perspective onto the status of narrative perspective and focalization in contemporary trauma fiction.

2020, Lammers, Lukas, Kellermann, Jonas

2019, Kellermann, Jonas

In his ground-breaking essay “Defying the Stars: Tragic Love as the Struggle for Freedom in Romeo and Juliet” (2012), Paul A. Kottman has challenged traditional readings of Shakespeare’s romantic tragedy as a pathetic story of two passive victims whose love is thwarted by overwhelming external forces. Rather, Kottman contends, the protagonists seek freedom by mutually recognising themselves as lover and beloved and eventually even deconstructing mortality as the ultimate horizon of human liberty. Kottman’s argument compliments Laurie Maguire’s reading of Romeo and Juliet as a tragedy of names, in which the lovers constitute their relationship through “acts of linguistic reciprocity” and manifest their love by learning to speak their beloved’s metaphorical language. While the duological construction of the protagonists’ relationship is indelibly tied to Shakespeare’s poeticized language, the play’s emphasis on mutuality and reciprocity as key dramaturgical factors renders the story particularly adaptable for art forms beyond that of spoken drama. This article will therefore argue that Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet is marked by a dramaturgy of reciprocity which makes it well suited for musical and choreographical adaptation. It will offer close readings of the aubade in 3.5 of Shakespeare’s play, the Scène d’amour in Hector Berlioz’s dramatic symphony Roméo et Juliette, and Sasha Waltz’s balletic interpretation of the Berlioz piece as a Pas de deux in her 2007 production with the Paris Opéra Ballet. The article will trace the creation and re-creation of a dramaturgy of reciprocity across three different art forms, proposing that while each case interprets the story using the particular aesthetics of the respective medium, their totality suggests a transverbal dramaturgical pattern beyond Shakespeare’s language – a dramaturgy which forms a crucial element of the iconicity of Romeo and Juliet as the quintessential amorous pairing in Western culture.

2021, Kellermann, Jonas

Bringing together current intermedial discourses on Shakespeare, music, and dance with the affective turn in the humanities, Dramaturgies of Love in Romeo and Juliet offers a unique and highly innovative transdisciplinary discussion of "unspeakable" love in one of the most famous love stories in literary history: the tragic romance of Romeo and Juliet. Through in-depth case studies and historical contextualisation, this book showcases how the "woes that no words can sound" of Shakespeare’s iconic lovers nevertheless have found expression not only in his verbal poetry, but also in non-verbal adaptations of the play in 19th-century symphonic music and 20th- and 21st-century theatre dance. Combining methodological approaches from diverse disciplines, including affect theory, musicology, and dance studies, this study opens up a new perspective onto the artistic representation of love, defining amorous emotion as a generically transformative constellation of dialogic performativity. To explore how this constellation has become manifest across the arts, this book analyses and compares dramatic, musical, and choreographic dramatisations of love in William Shakespeare’s early modern tragedy, French composer Hector Berlioz’s dramatic symphony Roméo et Juliette (1839), and the staging of Berlioz’s symphony by German contemporary choreographer Sasha Waltz for the Paris Opera Ballet (2007).

2020, Kellermann, Jonas

This article analyses Roméo’s silent solo dance in German choreographer Sasha Waltz’s staging of Hector Berlioz’s dramatic symphony Roméo et Juliette for the Paris Opera Ballet. The musicless scene, which imagines Roméo’s reaction to the news of Juliette’s ‘death’, exposes the dancer’s physicality through various acoustic means, creating a soundscape that makes the character’s despair accessible to the audience as affective intensities. The solo thus not only brings together competing stances towards emotionalism from classical and non-classical theatre dance, but also builds upon the philosophical interrogation of artistic expression both in Shakespeare’s play and in its musical adaptation by Berlioz.

2017, Kellermann, Jonas, Lammers, Lukas