The protoliterary : steps toward an anthropology of culture / K. Ludwig Pfeiffer.

Includes bibliographical references (pages 324-395) and index.

Preface: Eight Assumptions -- Introduction: Speculative Sketches - Critical Theory, Exegesis, Interpretation -- 1. First Exemplifications: The Novel and the Self-Therapy of the Medium -- Wilhelm Meister: The Cultural Potentials and Failures of Theatricality -- Joseph Andrews and Painting -- The Bride of Lammermoor, Opera, and Madame Bovary -- The Maltese Falcon: The Novel and the Film -- Provisional Consequences -- 2. Theory: Trends, Past and Present -- The Eighteenth Century: G. C. Lichtenberg and Media Analysis versus the Literary System -- The Nineteenth Century: Systems, Play, and the Anthropological Return of Experience -- Systems Theory: Implications, Historical and Otherwise -- Games and Play -- Experience and Play Again -- Nietzsche -- Images of Evolution -- 3. The Shrinkage of Fact and the Expansion of Performative Discourse -- The Poietic-Poetic Dilemma: "Drama," "Audience," Representation -- Tragedy and the Production of Social Realities -- The Play as a Model Discourse: Oedipus, Knowledge, and Power -- 4. Appearances: Shadowy Substances and Substantial Shadows -- 5. Between Sociology and Anthropology: Trends, Past and Present -- Ambivalences of Western Spectacles -- Japanese Theater and the West: A Quasi-Theoretical Outline -- Spectacular Theater, Sumo, and the Labors of Literature -- 6. Fragments of an Absent World Theater: "Baroque" and the Implicit Denial of Segment Culture -- Other Histories, and Their Theory -- Ben Jonson, Inigo Jones, John Dryden: Alternative Episodes in Western Cultural History -- The "Rise" of Opera: A Logical Coincidence in Media Development -- The Operative Principle Extended, or: From Dewey via Hegel to Adorno -- 7. First Steps - Theoretical and Practical -- Outlines and Perspectives -- More Examples: A Tennis Novel and Soccer Poetry -- 8. Symptoms: Exposed Flanks in Older Cultural Theories -- A Brutal Prelude and Its Implications -- Schiller: Conceptual Frictions and Cultural Discontinuities -- Marcuse: Aesthetics, Politics, and Atavisms -- Systems Theory against Itself -- Dance in Literature: The Poetry of the Body? -- 9. Ecstasy, Violence, "Literature": Early Western Cultures and Codes of Vitality -- Situations and Context Switches: Greek Models -- Rome: Culture Complex, the Imaginary, and Sports Reporting -- Sequels: More of the Same, but More Complicated -- 10. The Persistence of the Obsolete -- Byron and the Romantic Denial of Romantic Maximations -- Literary Skating; Or, Culture as Compromise -- Nietzsche (Once More) and the Fusion of Plausibility and Nonsense -- Notes -- Index.

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