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Paper Abstract: Critical analysis of themes, aesthetics, sociopolitics, characterizations, role of audience, postmodernism, Marxism. Paper Introduction: The purpose of this research is to examine the positions of dramatic critics and theorists on the work of Bertolt Brecht. The plan of the research will be to set forth methods that various theorists use to discuss Brecht's writings, to analyze competing political readings of his plays, and then to suggest a depoliticized reading of his work that is keyed to his aesthetic theory. As appropriate, reference will be made to the sometimes contradictory positions taken by Brecht as playwright, political personality, director of the Berliner Ensemble, and dramatic theorist. One important theorist of Brechtian drama is Brecht himself. His explanation of what he termed epic theatre can be taken as a starting point for understanding the context in which the pattern of ideas in his work and the means by which these ideas may be Text of the Paper: The entire text of the paper is shown below. However, the text is somewhat scrambled. We want to give you as much information as we possibly can about our papers and essays, but we cannot give them away for free. In the text below you will find that while disordered, many of the phrases are essentially intact. From this text you will be able to get a solid sense of the writing style, the concepts addressed, and the sources used in the research paper. But the means of epic theatre, which to thedegree they frankly abstract from those-of modern convention may be seen asa postmodern response to modernism, and the undoubted intelligenceinforming Brecht's presentation style throughout his plays lends weight tothe challenge that his ideas offer convention on one hand, and to thecreation of new theatrical conventions on the other. It was his deliberate insistence that feelings be played by his actors as if they were acted and not directly felt . Another may be the coincidence of Brecht's work asdramatic historiography and the scope of real-life history. . The continuity of theego is a myth. Brecht's work, which is overtly political in tone, is well suited tothis task of projecting and illustrating the irony of position vis-a-visfate, society, or moral abstraction, according to Wright. Ed.Eric Bentley. English Versionby Charles Laughton. The idea that the whole oflife is an aesthetic universe is one way in which one may explain and thenachieve a depoliticized experience of Brecht. 117-98.__________. Galileo, too, may be read as a play soattached to social and political commentary that it changed in response tomodern history. Eric Bentley. A Pelican Original. The postmodern critic rereads Brecht not so much to take at facevalue what he does or says or even to see the nexus of political issue anddramatic achievement. There are two other ways in which a depoliticization of Brecht'spolitically charged view of theatre can be seen to work. Nowadays the play's meaning isusually blurred by the fact that the actor plays to the audience's hearts.The figures portrayed are foisted on the audience and are falsified in theprocess. . in fact, the play has been compared to the harrowing tragedies of the Greeks and Elizabethans (Fuegi 91). Wright cites thecritical tendency to place Brecht's work into three phases, "from an earlysubjectivist, or anarchist, or nihilist phase in Baal (I make the world),to a middle-period rationalist, or behaviourist or mechanistic phase (theworld makes me), to a supposed dialectical resolution of the dilemmas ofphase one and two in the late plays (dialectic between self and world),presumed to usher in a third and mature phase" (Wright 6). Works CitedAbel, Lionel. Baltimore: Penguin, 1968.Brook, Peter. . New York: Grove, 1964. . The critical enterprise, on this view,becomes central to the theatrical and dramatic experience. Correspondingly, he became dissatisfied with the name he gave his kind of work in the late twenties--"epic theater"- -and at the end of his life was toying with the term "dialectical theatre" (Bentley, Reader's 84). The Theatre of the Absurd. Metatheatre: A New View of Dramatic Form. Another isBrecht's mastery of the theatrical moment, wherein confrontations may alsobe darkly humorous and ironic in a way that would be equally familiar toAristotle and Artaud. Garden City, New York:Doubleday/Anchor, 1961.Fuegi, John. One may easily cite Bentley's discussion of Galileo I(written in Germany in 1938) and Galileo II (produced in America in 1947).The latter version is the only one in translation. According to Wright, the problem with an exclusively politicalinterpretation of Brecht's plays is that politics can overtake art; shecites Marxist critics who call for "aesthetic emancipation," which sheinterprets as a call for reading Marx and Lenin instead of drama, which hasoutlived its usefulness. Totowa, New Jersey: Rowman and Littlefield,1977.Schoeps, Karl H. Supporters of this epic theatre argued that the new subjectmatter, the highly involved incidents of the class war in its acutest and most terrible stage, would be mastered more easily by such a method, since it would thereby become possible to portray social processes as seen in their causal relationships (Brecht, Scene 85). New York: Frederick Ungar, 1977.Shaffer, Peter. A Pocket Book.New York: Atheneum, 1965.Esslin, Martin. Amadeus. . New York:Grove Press, Inc., 1966.The Good Woman of Setzuan. A Man's a Man. . Good Woman of Setzuan reaches into thedepths of human experience of the moral (or more exactly immoral) universeby illustrating the impotence of divine intervention and the persistentmean-spiritedness of human interaction and enterprise; it is very clear atthe end of the play that Shen-Te will be eaten alive, both loved anddespised for her desperate goodness, fearful of being victimized by thosewhom she does not love and by Sun, whom she does love. This allows Jean Baudrillard, for example, tofunction at once as social and dramatic critic when he discusses strategiesfor enacting the whole of life. The aim is, perhaps, to discover what has emerged, to enter a game in order to produce the rules in order to find out who the players are. Postmodern Brecht: A Re-Presentation. Further, within the context of the epic-theatre idea and the sharply politicized content, there is enormous rangeof emotional content. If one can discern life strategies, onecan also discern the dramatic method that illustrates and inevitablycomments upon the meanings that the enactment of such strategies reveals.As Wright notes, after Baudrillard, that the powerless figures in society,such as women, children, animals, "do not just have a subject-consciousness, they have a kind of objective ironic presentiment that thecategory into which they have been placed does not exist. Trans. Which allowsthem at any given moment to make use of a double strategy . Brecht gives the name "A-effect" oralienation effect to the process whereby a scene may "allow the spectatorto criticize (a situation] constructively from a social point of view"(Brecht, Street 91). . AsHill puts it, "the modern theatre is the epic theatre" (142), by which hemeans that Brecht's influence on the course of the drama has beenirrevocable. The postmodern critic can make meanings that are somehow purelyaesthetic yet attached to such issues as politics, polemics, sociology, ormyriad human relationships. The principal theme ofthe earlier version was indeed the social imperative of free distributionof scientific truth to the world; Bentley points out that Galileo I waswritten at a time when "truth in Germany had to be hidden under coats"(Bentley, Introduction, Galileo 15). Is Brecht right about theatre in general and indeed about his ownwork in particular? Ed. While the definition of deconstruction as a critical discipline iselusive, one of its principal constituents appears to be that early andlate Brechtian drama, and early and late Brechtian theory can be placed ona more or less level playing field. That appears to be typical of the noncommunist response toplays that, owing to their excellence, could not simply be ignored owing totheir politics. In this regard, Bentley says that like "all other goodhistory plays, Galileo is about the playwright's own time" (2:14). Accordingly, The Caucasian Chalk Circle is really aplay within a play, wherein the subtext of Grusha's fate is also the fateof the dispute over the collective farm that putatively forms the occasionfor presentation of the fable. . Bentley says that "all Brecht's matureplays tend to present social rape, the rape of the innocent individual by acruel society" (Introduction, A Man's a Man 1 8). And of these latter, it could be said that, while they are less didactic in form, they are more instructive in effect. Ed. This is the critic-centered descriptionwith which Wright concludes: The corollary to Brecht's "classical" theory is that the art/life boundaries have been breached in a more radical way than ever before. The plan of theresearch will be to set forth methods that various theorists use to discussBrecht's writings, to analyze competing political readings of his plays,and then to suggest a depoliticized reading of his work that is keyed tohis aesthetic theory. Hence the task of refunctioning Brecht is already part of a Brechtian reading of postmodernism, turning it back from a consumer culture to a culture which can collect the marginal individual (Wright 139). . Introduction. There areother writers who not only put down what happened but give a theoreticalexplanation as a separate element. Eric Bentley. . In this connection, Bentley impliesthat Brecht had deconstructed himself before the new wave ofdeconstructionists came on the scene. Galileo is replete with the concerns of anallegedly Great Mind, but Brecht explores the irony of greatness, for hisGalileo is equally concerned about the uses to which science is put andwhether he will be the Great Man to get credit for inventing the telescope. Now what was Brecht's most characteristic theatrical device? What's beyond it wecall the irrational (Brecht, quoted in Willet 15). . Brecht's plays are, therefore, political. New York: Crowell, 1969.__________. The Marat/Sadetreats the Reign of Terror following the French Revolution of 1789, TheDeputy Pope Pius XII's failure to challenge Hitler's Final Solution, andAmadeus (in a lighter vein, to be sure) the nature of authentic versuspopular musical artistry. It is also thedeconstructionists' only way around Brecht's own characterization of hiswork as overtly political and classifiable. At some level the child knows that he is not achild, but the adult does not know that. . NewYork: Atheneum, 1965.Wright, Elizabeth. Buthe also says that "the attention other playwrights have given to theliterary form of their plays Brecht devoted indefatigably to the details ofhis productions . . The Street Scene. A Reader's Encyclopedia of theTheatre. And the confusion itself onlyexists because our head is an imperfect instrument. A Pocket Book. Winnipeg: Meridian, 1983. By Bertolt Brecht. In this production we might suppose that the grandmaster of epic theater, using the sets of Neher, and the acting talents of Angelika Hurwicz (as Kattrin), Helene Weigel (as Courage herself), and Ernst Busch (as the cook), would present the epic theater's very essence. The criticalaesthetic becomes the determinant of what the play or the dramatic theory"means" at a given point of history, perhaps irrespective of the form andoriginal intent of play or theory. . The Persecution and Assassination of Jean-Paul Marat as Performed by the Inmates of the Asylum of Charenton Under the Direction of the Marquis de Sade. Therein lies the talisman of Brechtian criticism andwhy, how, or whether audiences respond to the social implications ofsituations like these. For they are not matter for empathy;they are there to be understood. New York: Grove, 1964.2 5-18.__________. Galileo. The reality in his plays is that of theatre and not that of life, except as the latter happens to become theatrical (Abel 1 5). . New York: Grove Press, Inc., 1966.Brecht, Bertolt. Bertolt Brecht. Brecht's development was from a rather puritanical and perhaps even undialectical didacticism to a much fuller presentation of the dialectics of living. . [A child]has the possibility of offering himself as object, protected, recognized,destined as a child to the pedagogical function; and at the same time he isfighting on equal terms. that an epic well read can have an enormous emotional impact, I added that according to Brecht's own theory a specifically "epic" quality of his own plays and productions was the "narrative coolness" he supposed the medium to possess. To put it another way, as a Marxist, Brecht made a good impresario.Further to this point, Gorelick (268) notes that "Brecht's derisiveallusion to the 'bourgeois culinary theatre' is aimed especially at theemotionalist tradition onstage, a technique that encourages 'feelings,'whether or not they are relevant or even comprehensible . Hisexplanation of what he termed epic theatre can be taken as a starting pointfor understanding the context in which the pattern of ideas in his work andthe means by which these ideas may be realized on the stage. 3-113.__________. This being so,however, the significance of Brecht's work as a postmodern event does notlie either in the specific political position he takes, still less in thepsychological positions of the characters in them or in the politicizeddesign of the plays. Brecht proceeded torewrite the play and both indict Galileo for delaying the scientificknowledge of the people and use him to suggest the paradox that modernscience has irrevocably imperiled the people. As appropriate, reference will be made to thesometimes contradictory positions taken by Brecht as playwright, politicalpersonality, director of the Berliner Ensemble, and dramatic theorist. As Abel continues, Let us look first at the proposition "the world is a stage." If one does not believe that individuals are real or their sufferings of any great moment, then do not all human actions, reactions, and expressions of feeling immediately seem theatrical? He sees Brecht's generally ironicattitude and episodic dramatic form established as early as Baal, but evenwhere he sees a Marxist critique as the rationale for a play, such as inThreepenny Opera, which "seeks to expose bourgeois society by viewing theworld of Peachum and Brown in the same light as it does the underworld ofMacheath .... In particular, this derived from the power of theBerliner Ensemble to put on a show: Though I have argued . Wright's reading of Brecht as polemicalplaywright has less to do with what Brecht may have put forward or intendedto put forward than with what the critic has been able to discern about thework: "In addressing the social construction of the subject and recognizingthe part played by illusion in that construction, postmodernists arecalling upon radicals to realize how much of aesthetics there is inpolitics" (Wright 139). Boston: Twayne, 1975.Hochhuth, Rolf. On this view, "Brecht's case also showsthat the irrational Theatre of the Absurd and the highly purposefulpolitically committed play are not so much irreconcilable contradictionsas, rather, the obverse and reverse side of the same medal" (273). The Essential Brecht. But as epic-theatre modelsthey are also beyond politics because the focus of plays that followBrecht's formal model is not necessarily political, or at least not overtlypolitical in the sense of governance or war or international relations.Rather, in plays such as Amadeus, one sees the politics of psychology andinterpersonal relationships, and one sees psychopolitical claims being madefor a way of being in the world. . . The production has got to bring out the material incidents ina perfectly sober and matter-of-fact way. She is a characterwho embodies the paradox of the human experience of the consequences ofbehaving with decency. Baal, A Man's a Man, The Elephant Calf: Three Plays. John Gassner and Edward Quinn. . The Theory of the Modern Stage. Any aesthetic activity will be part of life itself, a political act involving actors that are audiences and audiences that are actors . Brecht, A Study. I'm one of them. Morley (4-6)makes the point that Brecht's entire aesthetic was in part a reaction todecadent German bourgeois drama on one hand and to the inadequacy of theExpressionist response on the other. Wrightattributes the inception of "phase" criticism to Esslin, upon whoseshoulders the idea was taken and popularized by others. Winnipeg: Meridian, 1983. "On Brechtian Acting." The Quarterly Journal ofSpeech, 6 (October, 1974), 265-78.Hill, Claude. By Peter Weiss. A man is an atom that perpetually breaks up and forms anew. EricBentley. The Deputy. One element of the response is the encounter ofbourgeois attitudes with the class struggle so important to Brecht,historical materialists, and Marxists around the world. But even Esslin says that a piece a these "stands or falls not by itspolitics but by its poetic truth, which is beyond politics" (Esslin 273).In context, Esslin's real point is that Brecht was a master of the Theatreof the Absurd, Esslin's term for the modernist drama of social, universal,and psychological dislocation. This attitude does much to explain characters who stake outsociopolitical positions that become moral abstractions, as well as theconfrontation of ideas that provides the design of dramatic conflict. Bertolt Brecht. . In Evita, one sees straightforwardpolitics, but one also sees-multimedia spectacle, a juxtaposition of film,opera, musical comedy, interactive theatre, and a host of experiments intheatricality that, 3 years after Brecht's death, are not reallyexperiments at all but exercises in various ideas Brecht had about thepotential force of theatricality. In other words, Brecht knewthat a serious artist needed to grow. Contrary to present custom they ought to be presented quitecoldly, classically and objectively. This, plainly, was never Brecht's view, howeverhe may have manipulated his plays to accord with prevailing communistdoctrine, and proof of that lies in his continuing to write plays anddevelop his dramatic theory. one is evident incommentaries that argue from poetic truth as the decisive element ofBrecht's thematic content, irrespective of political content. Bertolt Brecht. Baal. This is the moral contentof Abel's statement that the dramatic theory of metatheatre presumes that,as it were, all the world's a stage (Abel 1 5). The Elephant Calf. New York: Harper & Row, Publishers, 1981.Weiss, Peter. It is the development from plays of the period 1928-1934, which he himself labeled didactic (Lehrstucke), such as Die Ausnahme und die Regel (The exception and the Rule, 1938), to plays of the period 1938- 1944, such as Galileo, Mother Courage, and The Caucasian Chalk Circle. And then there is a third way of goingabout things, which aims at the mutual fusion of live material andconceptual analysis. it is an equation too easily drawn up, and drawn up, onesuspects, more for reasons for theatrical effectiveness than for anyMarxist interpretation of the social implications" (Morley 38). Two Plays by Bertolt Brecht. English Version by Charles Laughton. Another means of reading Brecht in a depoliticized way is to see thatthe Brechtian aesthetic has expanded into the wider culture of theatre. That is the secret" (Wright 136). The best test case for critical response is obviously Brecht's own production of the play with the Berliner Ensemble. By 1947, science itself had betrayedthe world at Hiroshima, and Bentley quotes Brecht's statement that"[o]vernight the biography of the founder of the new system of physics readdifferently" (Bentley, Introduction, Galileo 16). The battle to measure the heavens is won by doubt; by credulity the Roman housewife's battle for milk will always be lost. Ed. Word is passed down that this is of no concern to the scientist, who is told he will only release such of his findings as do not disturb the peace, that is, the peace of mind of the well-to-do . The Persecution and Assassination of Jean-Paul Marat as Performed by the Inmates of the Asylum of Charenton Underthe Direction of the Marquis de Sade. Morley,Michael. Changes in hisexterior continually lead to an inner reshuffling. Baal, A Man's a Man, The Elephant Calf: Three Plays. The point isthat the social or political concerns of epic theatre are not necessarilyinconsistent with the aims of what may conveniently be referred to asconventional modern theatre. Galileo's focus on an outstanding personality ofhistory, Mother Courage's setting on the violent fringes of a major post-medieval European war, A Man's a Man's focus on the shift in individualpersonality that is attributed to the shift in the perception of theprevailing power structure in the culture--all of these plays may be saidto anticipate such later plays as Marat/Sade, The Deputy, even Evita orAmadeus, each of which has not only deeply flawed protagonists but also anemphasis on Significant Ideas of one sort or another. Further to this point, Fuegi says that Brecht was basicallytoo good a playwright and too conscientious an artist to tie himself to asingle method or a single idea. This is so despite Brecht's specific attachment topolitical issues. New York: Grove, 1964.17-97.__________. Wright's survey of postmodern criticism of Brecht is presented with aview toward proposing not only "a postmodern reading of Brecht but also aBrechtian reading of postmodernism" (3). Two Plays by Bertolt Brecht. Preeminent concern with issues and ideas in virtually all of Brecht'splays is in keeping with the epic theatre's attempt to put the audience intouch with the dramatic situation rather than to help it identify with andfollow the fortunes of characters. Brecht was utterly conscientious in his search forthe right stage business to bring out the strongest meanings of his plays"(Abel 1 2). The significance of suggesting Brecht's programmatically ironic,paradoxical approach to character and story lies in the fact that the basisfor the attitudes the characters enact reaches beyond individualpsychology, through the enactment of such psychology and toward theinevitability of confrontation and interaction of the ideas individualshold of what properly constitutes the human community on one hand, and ofthemselves as members of that community on the other. New York: Grove Press, Inc., 1964. The overriding point is that, howevermuch Brecht connected his ideas of theatricality to his left-wing politics,his idea of the theatre overtook and even left behind the political contentof his theory of the role and power of the theatre. Ed. Los Angeles: Hennessey &Ingalls, Inc., 1972.Gorelick, Mordecai. This fact is in thebackground of (post)modern criticism of Brecht's plays and theory, whethersuch criticism is identified as analysis, deconstruction, reconstruction,or postmodernism. Eric Bentley. Thisis at the core of the A-effect that Brecht describes. This is apparent from internal evidence of the plays as wellas from critical theory. Wright also sees a problem with the "phase" theory of Brecht's work,which does not fit very well with a postmodern deconstructionist approachto it. . Mymaterial is intelligible; I don't first have to make it so. For most critics, both Communist and non-Communist, Mother Courage and Her Children is singularly lacking in this "cool" quality. . Eric Bentley. New York: Routledge, 1989.----------------------- 1 In other words, Wright's statedintent is to examine Brechtian criticism as such, even as she turns theresilience of Brecht's ideas back on criticism of them. Note: hesubordinates the feelings, he does not abolish them." Earlier it was saidthat Esslin found a deeply political element in Brecht's plays, andWright's view is that Esslin's comment in that regard became the startingpoint for a raft of criticism that focused in a misleading on Brecht'sMarxist polemic on one hand, and on Brecht's political and dramatic"maturation" on the other. One important theorist of Brechtian drama is Brecht himself. . . The purpose of this research is to examine the positions of dramaticcritics and theorists on the work of Bertolt Brecht. The Caucasian Chalk Circle. 115-233.__________. Whether, then, Brecht believed the world to be a stage or not, his plays, his concepts of acting and stage design, were all calculated to produce that effect. A reach for an aesthetic sensibility that is somehow independent ofthe content of Brecht's politics, his political drama, and his politicallybased theory because it makes politics and the whole of life into anaesthetic and declares that an aesthetic form of political expression hasto be seen as a bowdlerized, limiting aesthetic. Baal, A Man's a Man, The Elephant Calf:Three Plays. . Trans. Introduction. Galileo. To my mind only the first approach suits the dramaticform . We have to show things as they are . To be sure, a play such as Caucasian Chalk Circle is anchored by adispute in a soviet collective that has the effect of shifting, in goodStalinist fashion, ownership of a farm from traditional, naturallandholders to the irrigation-development collective, which like the wisemen of old concludes "that what there is shall go to those who are good forit, / Children to the motherly, that they prosper, / Carts to good drivers,that they be driven well, / The valley to the waterers, that it yieldfruit" (Brecht, Caucasian 233). Brecht elaboratesthis idea in a discussion of character as an adumbration, not determinant,of dramatic structure.There are writers who simply set down what happened. A Dramabook.New York: Hill & Wang, 1963.Bentley, Eric. Elsewhereand more generally, Morley says that Brecht's "contradictory pronouncementson the theatre are frequently the result not of a Marxist 'dialectical'method but of a simple addiction to paradox and to traditional dialectics"(Morley 91). Should you, then, in time, discover all there is to be discovered, your progress must become a progress away from the bulk of humanity (Brecht, Galileo 123- 4). The actor used a somewhat complex technique to detach himself from the character portrayed; he forced the spectator to look at the play's situations from such an angle that they necessarily became subject to his criticism. Brook specifically acknowledges his debt to Brecht in hisintroduction to Marat/Sade (5:6). Whether these latter plays are all specificallyillustrative of the playwrights' wrestling with fundamental economic orsocial laws that make up the class struggle is a matter apart, though classor money are specifically discussed in each (13:2 -1, et passim; 8:1 4-5;12:51). Brecht builds Galileo's failure to both be and not be a Great Man ona confusion of mythical and historical time, presenting a man who couldhave saved humanity but did not, presenting too a science that might havesaved humanity but (as everybody now knows) did the reverse, simplifyingthe issue of the recantation in order to speak to social evils of powerrelationships. . By 1954, when the Berliner Ensemble moved into its own building,Brecht could try out this theory and that, to see whether the desired A-effect could be achieved, and whether once achieved it would be desired.According to Abel, Brecht wanted great theatricality in presentation. In this regard, Abel's description of drama asmetatheatre is predicated of dramatic forms that "are related to and taketheir life from values which are important outside of drama" (Abel viii).Brecht's work falls well within this description. Instead, the critic takes an active role inexamining what the plays and the theory may reveal about politics, life,dramatic relevance, and so on. Feelings are private and limited.Against that the reason is fairly comprehensive and to be relied on ....Even when a character behaves by contradictions that's only because nobodycan be identically the same at two unidentical moments. If this paper is not what you are looking for, you can search again: Search for: or Click here to request an essay written just for you.