On The Humanity Theme And Artistic Features Of Tersites

Stefan Zweig (1881-1942), as a famous Austrian novelist, biographer, essayist, playwright and poet, is an Austrian German writer who enjoys the most reader and the most widely circulated works. Known for psychological depicting, Zweig pays a lot of attention to depict the palpitating and passion of individual soul, thus his works hold a unique charm to readers. Zweig is master of various genres. He not only wrote poems, novels, dramas, literary theory, biography, but engaged in literary translation as well. He created almost forty pieces of work through his life, which include six collections of short stories, and two novels (one of which is unfinished), twelve biographies, seven dramas, three volumes of poetry, nine collections of essays and one autobiography. Of all his works, novels and biographies are the most known; therefore, he is honored as one of the three masters in short stories and one of the three biographers in 20th century.The thesis is divided into three parts, i.e. introduction, body and conclusion.The introduction part introduces the review of researches on Zweig at both home and abroad, and the significance of the topic and the research methods. This paper argues that why few scholars attach any importance to Zweig's achievement on creation of dramas and the important role dramas play in his creation. It is beacuae politics, language, research bias and many other reasons. Tersites is Zweig's first play snd has a very important research value, but the research material of Tersites is rarely. Secondly, the introduction part demonstrates the significance of the topic and the research methods of the thesis. Adopting the methods of close interpretation, comparative literature, aesthetic criticism and the mytho-archetypical criticism, the thesis tries to make a comprehensive interpretation to Zweig's first drama Tersites, and appraise its theme, characters and art features. From this point, the thesis can be said to be a monographic study,and the first comprehensive interpretation to Zweig's drama Tersites. Another significance of the topic lies in the associated research with other works of Zweig and his whole creations when Tersites is analyzed, through which the artistic value of Tersites, its deep influence and fundamental role on Zweig's creation are defined.The body part consists of three chapters. The first chapter analyzes the theme of humanity in the Tersites which includes topics such as sympathy, freedom, fairness, love, and resistance to power and war. The theme of Tersites shows a profound and rich connotation of humanity since it, on one hand, embodies the truest and the most beautiful qualities of human beings, and on the other hand, reveals the underlying causes of the humanity weakness. This is Zweig's unique understanding about humanity. On the basis of the analysis of the humanity theme in Tersites, the thesis associates with Zweig's other works to prove the penetrability of the humanity theme in his works. He gives his exclusive attention to humanity and describes it. There is a red clue-the constant humanity theme in Tersites, runs through all his works, which expresses his understanding and concern about humanity.The second chapter analyzes the three main characteristics in Tersites:Tersites, Achilles and Taloya. Each of the three characters has its own prototype, but respectively, but they all have new features made by Zweig. Remodeling of the characters embodies Zweig's concept of hero and its criterion, which is humanity. Thus means that hero is the man with fine humanity but handsome or ranking high. Also the remodeling embodies Zweig's vision of love. There always has passion in love description, which is started in Tersites. Passion is a significant feature in Zweig's creations. Through the analysis of this three characters, conclusion can be made that characters in Tersites are the rudiment of characteristic characters in Zweig's works, which reveals the favor and unique in Zweig's characterization.The third chapter summarizes the distinguishing art feature in Tersites,which is firstly embodied by the technique expression of psychological realism, which is revealed by monologue and dialogue of the characters in the drama. Zweig praises highly Freud's psychoanalysis. He pays much attention to man's soul and reveals humanity and nature of the society through the description of change and development of psychology with distinct realism. The second are feature of Tersites is the two structure clues interweave internally and externally. The internal clue is the intrapsychic conflict of characters and the external clue is character conflict. Thus Zweig makes the contrast between Tersites and other characters, models the figure of Tersites, on the other hand describes the soul world and reveals the humanistic connotations. The third are feature is utilizing of kinds of figures of speech, including exaggeration, comparison and irony. Tersites is very ugly, but he is great in humanity. Zweig focus on highlighting Tersites ugly and lowly to make Tersites's image is very prominent. Of course. Zweig is a realist writer, he also descripted human weakness of Tersites. Tersites is a comedy in gag description, but a tragedy at the core.Conclusion is a summary, show that Tersites play an important role in Zweig's creation, the research of Zweig is very important, and pointed out some shortcoming of this paper.