Decadence And Redemption

Wilhelm Richard Wagner(1813-1883)is a world-famous German composer and playwright.As Richard Wagner’s swan song,the play Parsifal is a text which has multiple significance in western cultural history.This paper mainly from the literary point of view,integrated use research methods such as text analysis,body aesthetics,ethical literary criticism,interdisciplinary study of literature and philosophy,to discuss it’s theme of decadence and redemption.This thesis consists of an introduction,the main body and a conclusion.Its main contents are as follows:The first part is introduction,which firstly introduces Wagner’s literature,summarizes the research status of Wagner ’s play and especially Parsifal at home and abroad.And then,concepts related to the thesis are defined,research methods and innovations are explained.The second part the main body,which is made up of three chapters.Chapter One analyzes the world of decadence which are showed in the play from the perspective of body.It’s discussed by the dual logic of decadence’s degree from light to heavy and the order of decadence’s occurrence.The magician Klingsor’s self-mutilation and the king of the Grail kingdom Amfortas’s never healed wound,are both caused by sexuality.The only actress Kundry,as a sex seducer and a sleeping weary,is a connection of two kinds of men in this chapter’s part one and three.Part three mainly discusses the knight of the Grail Gurnemanz’s senescence and the former King Titurel’s death.Chapter Two discusses the redemption after decadence.It involves three levels.Firstly,redemption is treatment depend on drug and relic,which can be regarded as the redemption of body.It’s proved to be ineffective.Secondly,in the process of finding the Holy Spear,Parsifal learns sympathy for the suffering of others,and boycotts Kundry’s seduction.It’s Parsifal ’s self-redemption.Thirdly,Parsifal saves Kundry,Amfortas and so on.He rescues the Grail kingdom from calamity,and becomes the new king.Chapter Three reveals that the essence of decadence and redemption are both spiritual,the former is ethical confusion of Christian ethics,the latter is reconstruction of ethical order.The last part is conclusion.Through the expound of Nietzsche and Wagner ’s different comprehensions of Parsifal,the author point out the debate of Parsifal is the controversy of two kinds of philosophy of life under the background of Christianity.Nietzsche believes that the decadence he finds in Christianity is anti-life,while Wagner recognizes redemption is positive in religious spirit.