On Tragic Consciousness Of Zweig's Collective-Biographies Of Writers

As one of the famous Austria authors in the 20th century, Stefan Zweig, whose short stories and novellas are well known to us, produced some biographies that hold an important position in the 20th century biographical creation. World Masters, representative of his biographical creation, consists in three writers' collective-biographies, that is, Three Masters, Self-Portrait and Fight the Devil. Several Chinese scholars starting from the relations between Zweig's biographical creation and psychoanalytical study have made some specific research on single-writer biography. This current thesis focuses upon the tragic consciousness represented by World Masters in the perspective of modern hermeneutics.Firstly, hermeneutics holds it true that any literary writing is more or less interpretation, which becomes a new form of re-understanding and re-interpretation involved with authors'subjective factors as a result of authors'choices or selections of historical texts in accordance of his'fore-structure'. While biographical creation remains interpretations as well, interpretations in biographies are demanded to satisfy the historically truthful appeals of biographies.Secondly, interpreters''fore-structure'influence and decide their choices of historical text, which is the material of biography. And Zweig chose and explained his material in the'fore-structure'of tragic sense. His tragic sense reflects a kind of view of substitutive characteristic of life and society. This characteristic is that life is filled with pains and misfortune that is created by contrary forces of human beings. But when met with these contrary forces, human beings should fight them toughly even at the price of their lives. And in this way, human beings could reach somewhere beyond themselves. And his tragic consciousness is mainly from his suffering consciousness of Jewish people and Nietzsche's philosophic thinking.Thirdly, Zweig's historical text is the lives of features in his biographies. Zweig's 'fore-structure'influence his choices of the lives of heroes in his biographies. Influenced by his tragic consciousness, Zweig often chose the heroes'misfortune, pains and crisis in their lives to explore their tragedies. In this section, other materials were used to find tragic elements of such heroes as Charles Dickens, Leo Tolstoy and Friedrich Nietzsche, that is, their misfortune and pains. Fourthly, under his tragic sense, Zweig established a moving and tragic key-note of his biographies, to reflect the dilemma of human survival and showed the heroes fighting against these difficulties. Using juxtaposition and comparison, he transformed the historical texts to his biographical texts to show the tragic consciousness of his biographies.Last but not the least, in the perspective of hermeneutic, it is the convergence of horizons of Zweig of tragic consciousness and tragic-element horizons of nine heroes, which looms large in World Masters.