4 - Emancipation and Sociohistorical Approaches

Summary

The last chapter described the investigations resulting from the momentum of the 1962 centennial of Schnitzler's birth: the present chapter addresses the time frame of scholarly activity surrounding the fiftieth anniversary of his death, celebrated in 1981, and is underpinned by a particular theme and mode. The theme is emancipation, and while it is possible that any author's works can be queried concerning the level of freedom they reveal concerning class, race, and gender, this is particularly true in Schnitzler's case. To scholars of the late seventies and eighties, his works invited a mode of sociohistorical analysis that shifted the critical spotlight from aesthetic concerns to questions of content. The historical backdrop for Schnitzler's works began to be clarified by an audience mostly unfamiliar with the specific constraints on emancipation during Schnitzler's time, although well-acquainted with the vocabulary of emancipation in the present.

Granted, sociohistorical inquiry is in some respects always about uncovering the status of emancipation in literature; in other respects, investigations driven by concerns of emancipation do not always address the historical backdrop. For the examples that follow, however, the convergence of mode and theme becomes explicit. Also apparent is how the various combinations of race, class, and gender make productive a discussion of the institutions such as fraternities, salons, and the military, as well as of the class-crossing practice of dueling.