The Mass Ornament: Weimar Essays by Siegfried Kracauer (review)

82Rocky Mountain Review victim's wrongs and negotiate restitution. In contrast, a tragic landscape wherein justice is neither swift nor inevitable renders such vindication ineffectual : a case in point is Emilia's defense of Desdemona. In the benign worlds of comedy and romance, however, a Prospero may actualize an ideal: a perfect and relatively painless revenge which achieves personal vindication , a redress of past wrongs, and the restoration of power and position. The Shapes of Revenge makes a helpful contribution to our understanding of Shakespeare's treatment of revenge through its extensive and extended definitions of revenge and vindictiveness. By classifying Shakespeare's major and minor characters in terms of these categories, Keyishian is able to probe the psychology of revenge in terms of Shakespeare's cultural and intellectual milieu, in prose which is both lucid and refreshingly free of jargon. Keyishian expends the force of his textual evidence in mapping out and illustrating the permutations of revenge, and some readers may be disappointed that less attention is devoted to exploring and analyzing the ways in which revengers affirm, subvert, or invite us to interrogate the cultural ideals and norms presented as absolutes in the fictional universes of the plays. Keyishian himself argues that our ongoing engagement with Shakespeare stems largely from our shared interest in the conflict between individual rights and the need for social order, yet the study itself does not address how the idea of victimization is determined by the ways in which social "good" is defined and constructed, and whose interests and agendas are served and legitimized by this socially constructed order. Nevertheless, The Shapes ofRevenge succeeds in "mak(ing) it difficult to speak too glibly either of the sinfulness of revenge or the virtue of forgiveness in Shakespeare's work" (167). Undergraduates and teachers of Shakespeare will find the study an excellent starting point for exploring Shakespeare's revengers and larger issues of victimization and empowerment central to Shakespeare's art. LAUREL L. HENDRLX California State University, Fresno SIEGFRIED KRACAUER. The Mass Ornament: Weimar Essays. Trans. Thomas Y. Levin. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995. 403 p. The critic Siegfried Kracauer (1889-1966) is best known in this country for his "psychological history of the German film," From Caligari to Hitler (1947). He may also be remembered for his Theory ofFilm: The Redemption ofPhysical Reality (1960) and for his long meditative essay on history, "the Last Things before the Last" (1969). But not nearly enough of his prodigious writing has been translated into English; even the edition of his works in German has only recently been given the care (by Inka Müller-Bach) it deserves . It is inevitable, therefore, that Kracauer's posthumous reputation Book Reviews83 has largely been defined not by his provocative originality but through his association with Benjamin and Adorno and with Horkheimer's Institute for Social Research. His contributions, for example, as a seminal theorist of cultural phenomena in twentieth-century mass societies have been discussed, to be sure, with critical subtlety; but his relevance for cultural studies, specifically for the critique of totalitarian ideologies has not been appreciated sufficiently by those engaged in the discourses both of poststructuralism and of the new historicism. Kracauer has largely remained an insiders' tip, the property of a few academic experts, since many of his ideas, suggestions , and provisos have been absorbed into the language of Critical Theory. In part his relative neglect is due to biographical circumstances, to his "extraterritorial life" (See Martin Jay's Permanent Exiles [New York: Columbia University Press, 1985].), his loathing of self-promotion, and his absence from the public debates of the 1960s. It is also a result of his particular sensibility and style. His writings show a multifarious blend of the most lucid intellectualism with speculative, even ruminative theorizing, sometimes dogged in its relentless probing, sometimes given to surrealistic extravagance; they reveal a determined, if not single-minded devotion to a critical paradigm (as in the way he makes nearly all of Weimar film into a long photo album of pre-fascist mentalities, intentionally or unconsciously propagated), and yet they are also full of acute perceptions and of amazing insights that are derived from seemingly insignificant details...