Brecht and MethodThe 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choice and contradiction in Brecht’s entire corpus, Jameson’s study engages in a dialogue with a cryptic work, unpublished in Brecht’s lifetime, entitled Me-ti; Book of Twists and Turns.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 |
Gestus 9 Pedagogy as Autoreferentiality | 89 |
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Common terms and phrases
abstract actant actor aesthetic allegorical allegorical process already Barthes Barthes's become bourgeois Brecht Brechtian called capitalism Chinese classical collective concept contradiction critique culture Darko Suvin dialectic dimension distinct doctrine doubt dramatic dramaturgy emergence estrangement estrangement-effect ethical example fundamental Galileo gesture Gilles Deleuze grasp Grundgestus Heiner Müller historical human idea identified ideology individual judgement Jungle of Cities kind language later Lehrstücke lesson literary Marx Marxism Me-ti means metaphysical method modern modernist Mother Courage movement muß narrative nature offer opposition parable particular Peachum's peasant pedagogy perhaps person philosophical play political position postmodern praxis precisely production question radical reification relationship representation revolution Roland Barthes seems sense sheer situation social specific stage stereotypical suggest T. S. Eliot theatre theatrical theory thereby things thought Three-Penny Opera tion tradition Trennung ultimate unique utopian V-effect Walter Benjamin Willett words XVIII