Brecht and Method

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Verso, 1998 - Literary Criticism - 184 pages
The legacy of Bertolt Brecht is much contested, whether by those who wish to forget or to vilify his politics, but his stature as the outstanding political playwright and poet of the twentieth century is unforgettably established in this major critical work. Fredric Jameson elegantly dissects the intricate connections between Brecht’s drama and politics, demonstrating the way these combined to shape a unique and powerful influence on a profoundly troubled epoch. Jameson sees Brecht’s method as a multi-layered process of reflection and self-reflection, reference and self-reference, which tears open a gap for individuals to situate themselves historically, to think about themselves in the third person, and to use that self-projection in history as a basis for judgement. Emphasising the themes of separation, distance, multiplicity, choice and contradiction in Brecht’s entire corpus, Jameson’s study engages in a dialogue with a cryptic work, unpublished in Brecht’s lifetime, entitled Me-ti; Book of Twists and Turns. This text is seen by Jameson as key to understanding Brecht’s critical reflections on dialectics and his orientally informed fascination with flow and flux, change and the non-eternal. For Jameson, Brecht is not prescriptive but performative. His plays do not provide answers but attempt to show people how to perform the act of thinking, how to begin to search for answers themselves. Brecht represents the ceaselessness of transformation while at the same time alienating it, interrupting it, making it comprehensible by making it strange. And thereby, in breaking it up by analysis, the possibility emerges of its reconstitution under a new law.
 

Contents

Nützliches
1
Monadic Chronologies
5
Triangulating Brecht
19
PARTI DoctrineLehre 4 Estrangements of the EstrangementEffect
35
Autonomization
43
Episch or the Third Person
51
Dualities of the Subject
58
From Multiplicity to Contradiction
66
Parable
99
Grundgestus
105
Casus
118
ProverbsSprüche
131
Representability of Capitalism
149
Epilogue
165
Index
181
Copyright

Gestus 9 Pedagogy as Autoreferentiality
89

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About the author (1998)

Fredric R. Jameson, Marxist theorist and professor of comparative literature at Duke University, was born in Cleveland in 1934. He earned a Ph.D. from Harvard University and taught at Harvard, the University of California at San Diego, and Yale University before moving to Duke in 1985. He most famous work is Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, which won the Modern Language Association's Lowell Award. Jameson was among the first to associate a specific set of political and economic circumstances with the term postmodernism. His other books include Sartre: The Origin of a Style, The Seeds of Time, and The Cultural Turn.

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