Postmodern Brecht

Postmodern Brecht
Author: Elizabeth Wright
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 205
Release: 2016-08-19
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1134833377

In this radical and deliberately controversial re-reading of Brecht, first published in 1989, Elizabeth Wright takes a new view of the playwright, giving us a more ‘Brechtian’ reading than so far achieved and making his work historically relevant here and now. The author discusses in detail Brecht’s principle theories and concepts in the light of poststructuralist theory, and reassess the aesthetics and politics with regard to Marxist critics of his own day. Wright includes a re-reading of Brecht’s early works, which presents them in relation to a postmodern theatre, and gives critical analyses of the work of Pina Bausch, Robert Wilson, and Heiner Müller, who use the techniques of performance theatre, showing how they deconstruct Brecht’s distinction between illusion and reality and point to a postmodern understanding of their dialectical relation.

Postmodern Brecht

Postmodern Brecht
Author: Elizabeth Wright
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 154
Release: 1989
Genre: Postmodernism.
ISBN: 9780415023306

Post-Imperial Brecht

Post-Imperial Brecht
Author: Loren Kruger
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 428
Release: 2004-08-19
Genre: Drama
ISBN: 9780521817080

Post-Imperial Brecht challenges prevailing views of Brecht's theatre and politics. Kruger focuses much of her analysis in regions where Brecht has had special resonance, including East Germany, and South Africa, where Brechtian philosophy has been vigorously employed in the anti-apartheid movement. Kruger also analyses political interpretations of Brecht in light of other key dramatists, including Heiner MÜller and Athol Fugard. The book also examines Brechtian influence on writers and philosophers such as Adorno, Benjamin, and Barthes.

After Brecht

After Brecht
Author: Janelle G. Reinelt
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
Total Pages: 250
Release: 1994
Genre: Drama
ISBN: 9780472084081

How contemporary British political theater has evolved and expanded from the legacy of Bertolt Brecht

Shakespeare, Brecht, and the Intercultural Sign

Shakespeare, Brecht, and the Intercultural Sign
Author: Antony Tatlow
Publisher: Duke University Press
Total Pages: 309
Release: 2001-09-24
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0822380897

In Shakespeare, Brecht, and the Intercultural Sign renowned Brecht scholar Antony Tatlow uses drama to investigate cultural crossings and to show how intercultural readings or performances question the settled assumptions we bring to interpretations of familiar texts. Through a “textual anthropology” Tatlow examines the interplay between interpretations of Shakespeare and readings of Brecht, whose work he rereads in the light of theories of the social subject from Nietzsche to Derrida and in relation to East Asian culture, as well as practices within Chinese and Japanese theater that shape their versions of Shakespearean drama. Reflecting on how, why, and to what effect knowledges and styles of performance pollinate across cultures, Tatlow demonstrates that the employment of one culture’s material in the context of another defamiliarizes the conventions of representation in an act that facilitates access to what previously had been culturally repressed. By reading the intercultural, Tatlow shows, we are able not only to historicize the effects of those repressions that create a social unconscious but also gain access to what might otherwise have remained invisible. This remarkable study will interest students of cultural interaction and aesthetics, as well as readers interested in theater, Shakespeare, Brecht, China, and Japan.

Brecht and Critical Theory

Brecht and Critical Theory
Author: Sean Carney
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 216
Release: 2020-07-24
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 1000143228

Arguing that Brecht’s aesthetic theories are still highly relevant today, and that an appreciation of his theory and theatre is essential to an understanding of modern critical theory, this book examines the influence of Brecht’s aesthetic on the pre-eminent materialist critics of the twentieth century: Louis Althusser, Walter Benjamin, Roland Barthes, Frederic Jameson, Theodor W. Adorno and Raymond Williams. Re-reading Brecht through the lens of post-structuralism, Sean Carney asserts that there is a Lacanian Brecht and a Derridean Brecht: the result of which is a new Brecht whose vital importance for the present is located in decentred theories of subjectivity. Brecht and Critical Theory maps the many ways in which Brechtian thinking pervades critical thought today, informing the critical tools and stances that make up the contemporary study of aesthetics.

Performing Brecht

Performing Brecht
Author: Margaret Eddershaw
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 202
Release: 2002-08-27
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 1134895402

Performing Brecht is an unprecedented history of the productions of Brecht's plays in Britain over forty years. Margaret Eddershaw surveys all aspects of Brecht in performance, from his methodologies to his place in postmodernist theatre and beyond. She focuses on key productions by directors including George Devine, Sam Wanamaker, William Gaskill, Howard Davies, John Dexter and Richard Eyre. Eddershaw also provides three in-depth case studies of productions in the 1990s, incorporating her own exclusive access to the rehearsals and in-depth interviews with directors and performers. The case studies are: * The Good Person of Sechuan, directed by Deborah Warner and starring Fiona Shaw; * Mother Courage, directed by Philip Prowse and starring Glenda Jackson; * The Resistable Rise of Arturo Ui, directed by Di Trevis and starring Antony Sher