Brecht On Art And Politics

This volume contains new translations to extend our image of one of the twentieth century's most entertaining and thought provoking writers on culture, aesthetics and politics. Here are a cross-section of Brecht's wide-ranging thoughts which offer us an extraordinary window onto the concerns of a modern world in four decades of economic and political disorder. The book is designed to give wider access to the experience of a dynamic intellect, radically engaged with social, political and cultural processes. Each section begins with a short essay by the editors introducing and summarising Brecht's thought in the relevant year.

This volume contains new translations to extend our image of one of the twentieth century's most entertaining and thought provoking writers on culture, aesthetics and politics. Here are a cross-section of Brecht's wide-ranging thoughts which offer us an extraordinary window onto the concerns of a modern world in four decades of economic and political disorder. The book is designed to give wider access to the experience of a dynamic intellect, radically engaged with social, political and cultural processes. Each section begins with a short essay by the editors introducing and summarising Brecht's thought in the relevant year.

An intense and lively debate on literature and art between thinkers who became some of the great figures of twentieth-century philosophy and literature. With an afterword by Fredric Jameson No other country and no other period has produced a tradition of major aesthetic debate to compare with that which unfolded in German culture from the 1930s to the 1950s. In Aesthetics and Politics the key texts of the great Marxist controversies over literature and art during these years are assembled in a single volume. They do not form a disparate collection but a continuous, interlinked debate between thinkers who have become giants of twentieth-century intellectual history.

Is postdramatic theatre political and if so how? How does it relate to Brecht's ideas of political theatre, for example? How can we account for the relationship between aesthetics and politics in new forms of theatre, playwriting, and performance? The chapters in this book discuss crucial aspects of the issues raised by the postdramatic turn in theatre in the late twentieth and early twenty-first century: the status of the audience and modes of spectatorship in postdramatic theatre; the political claims of postdramatic theatre; postdramatic theatre's ongoing relationship with the dramatic tradition; its dialectical qualities, or its eschewing of the dialectic; questions of representation and the real in theatre; the role of bodies, perception, appearance and theatricality in postdramatic theatre; as well as subjectivity and agency in postdramatic theatre, dance and performance. Offering analyses of a wide range of international performance examples, scholars in this volume engage with Hans-Thies Lehmann's theoretical positions both affirmatively and critically, relating them to other approaches by thinkers ranging from early theorists such as Brecht, Adorno and Benjamin, to contemporary thinkers such as Fischer-Lichte, Rancière and others

First published in 1988, this books argues with received accounts to reclaim Brecht’s emphasis on his self-described ‘dialectical theatre’, re-examining firstly the concepts of Gestus and Verfremdung and their realisation in Brecht’s poetry in terms of his attempt to consciously apply the methods of dialectical materialism to art and cultural practice. The author also takes issue with the customary view of Brecht’s career and politics which sees him as compromising either with Communist party dogma or bourgeois aesthetics, to find developing parallels between Brecht’s political and artistic though and the critical dialectics of Marx, Lenin and Mao. This development is examined in later chapters in relation to the early and late plays, The Measures Taken and Days of the Commune as well as in relation to Brecht’s changed circumstances in the years of war-time exile and in post-war East Germany.

This book presents Brecht’s thought in the context of a revolutionary Marxist aesthetic and explores his vision of consciousness as it relates to historical materialism, the dialectic of enlightenment, social ontology, epistemology and ethics.

These essays represent the push to provide interdisciplinary Brecht research to English-speaking audiences following his death in 1956 and offer novel readings of his works indicative of the major literary questions of the time. The essays explore both Brecht's theoretical approach and political thought, with many also taking a comparative approach to analysis of individual plays. The contributors are Reinhold Grimm, Karl-Heinz Schoeps, Herbert Knust, Hans Meyer, Siegfried Mews, Raymond English, James Lyon, Darko Suvin, Gisela Bahr, Grace Allen, Ralph Ley, John Fuegi, Andrzej Wirth and David Bathrick.

No other country and no other period has produced a tradition of major aesthetic debate to compare with that which unfolded in German culture from the 1930s to the 1950s. In Aesthetics and Politics the key texts of the great Marxist controversies over literature and art during these years are assembled in a single volume. They do not form a disparate collection but a continuous, interlinked debate between thinkers who have become giants of twentieth-century intellectual history.