Exposed1983

Leo Boscovitch:
[first spoken lines in English] The Western world is breaking down. Socially, politically, economically, morally, aesthetically and psychologically. Really, if you look into your own lives there are only two routes of escape from this dark claustrophobic trap: art and romantic love. In the novel you are supposed to read by monday "The Sorrows of Young Werther" Goethe through his art reveals not only the ecstasy of romantic love but also the doomed consequences that necessarily follow. Driven by his excruciating passion to the brink of suicide, Werther, the novel's hero, says to Charlotte: "Your hands have grasped these pistols, you have wiped them for me, those hands from which I've longed wish to receive my fate." This language is straight from the German romantic tradition of the 19th Century but the sensibility is of our time. As Leslie Fiedler writing about Werther comments: "Here is the final twist, the theme of the redeeming maiden, woman who was the angel of redemption becomes the angel of death. But for Werther death is redemption. The only salvation he can use."