Going Baroque: August Strindberg on Science and the Visual Arts

August Strindberg is regarded as a founding father of modern drama. In the groundbreaking plays To Damascus, A Dream Play and The Ghost Sonata he develops an innovative dream-poetics that had a profoundly influenced later writers and directors. Paradoxically, the radical modernism evident in these plays and other writings is built on archaic and anti-modern premises. In the 1890s, Strindberg abandoned fiction and began experiments in chemistry, alchemy, photography, and optics, seeking to develop an interdisciplinary total science. This work is arguably a conscious attempt to reject the scientific paradigm for a regression to archaic, medieval and baroque ideas about God, nature, man and his place in the universe. In this talk, Balbierz (Jagiellonian University in Krakow) reconstructs Strindberg’s scientific theories and show how he uses modern media such as photography to create an aesthetics that is both modernist and neo-baroque.