Archaeology of the Political Unconscious

Archaeology of the Political Unconscious PDF Author: Jennifer Williams
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1040120024
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 206

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Book Description
This book investigates the aesthetic and political dialectics of East Berlin to argue how its theater and opera stages incited artists to act out, fuel, and resist the troubled construction of political legitimacy. This volume investigates three case studies of how leading East Berlin stages excavated fragmentary materials from Weimar dramatist Bertolt Brecht’s oeuvre and repurposed them for their post‐fascist society: Uta Birnbaum’s 1967 Man Equals Man at the Berliner Ensemble, Joachim Herz’s 1977 Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny at the Komische Oper, and Heiner Muller’s own productions of his trailblazing plays. In each instance, reused theatrical artifacts dialectically expressed the contradictions inherent in East German political legitimacy, at once amplifying and critiquing it. Illuminated by original archival research and translations of letters and artistic ephemera published in English for the first time, and engaging with alternative East German feminist epistemologies, this book’s critical investigation of culture and political legitimacy in the shadow of Germany’s fascist past resonates beyond the Iron Curtain into the twenty‐first century. Its final chapter examines how performative artifacts influence the process of political legitimation in more recent history, ranging from Checkpoint Charlie tourism to the January 6, 2021 US insurrection. This study will be of great interest to students and scholars in theater and performance studies, art history, musicology, German studies, anthropology, and political science.

Archaeology of the Political Unconscious

Archaeology of the Political Unconscious PDF Author: Jennifer Williams
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1040120024
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 206

Get Book Here

Book Description
This book investigates the aesthetic and political dialectics of East Berlin to argue how its theater and opera stages incited artists to act out, fuel, and resist the troubled construction of political legitimacy. This volume investigates three case studies of how leading East Berlin stages excavated fragmentary materials from Weimar dramatist Bertolt Brecht’s oeuvre and repurposed them for their post‐fascist society: Uta Birnbaum’s 1967 Man Equals Man at the Berliner Ensemble, Joachim Herz’s 1977 Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny at the Komische Oper, and Heiner Muller’s own productions of his trailblazing plays. In each instance, reused theatrical artifacts dialectically expressed the contradictions inherent in East German political legitimacy, at once amplifying and critiquing it. Illuminated by original archival research and translations of letters and artistic ephemera published in English for the first time, and engaging with alternative East German feminist epistemologies, this book’s critical investigation of culture and political legitimacy in the shadow of Germany’s fascist past resonates beyond the Iron Curtain into the twenty‐first century. Its final chapter examines how performative artifacts influence the process of political legitimation in more recent history, ranging from Checkpoint Charlie tourism to the January 6, 2021 US insurrection. This study will be of great interest to students and scholars in theater and performance studies, art history, musicology, German studies, anthropology, and political science.

The Political Unconscious

The Political Unconscious PDF Author: Fredric Jameson
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 0801471575
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 307

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Book Description
Fredric Jameson, in The Political Unconscious, opposes the view that literary creation can take place in isolation from its political context. He asserts the priority of the political interpretation of literary texts, claiming it to be at the center of all reading and understanding, not just a supplement or auxiliary to other methods current today. Jameson supports his thesis by looking closely at the nature of interpretation. Our understanding, he says, is colored by the concepts and categories that we inherit from our culture's interpretive tradition and that we use to comprehend what we read. How then can the literature of other ages be understood by readers from a present that is culturally so different from the past? Marxism lies at the foundation of Jameson's answer, because it conceives of history as a single collective narrative that links past and present; Marxist literary criticism reveals the unity of that uninterrupted narrative. Jameson applies his interpretive theory to nineteenth- and twentieth-century texts, including the works of Balzac, Gissing, and Conrad. Throughout, he considers other interpretive approaches to the works he discusses, assessing the importance and limitations of methods as different as Lacanian psychoanalysis, semiotics, dialectical analysis, and allegorical readings. The book as a whole raises directly issues that have been only implicit in Jameson's earlier work, namely the relationship between dialectics and structuralism, and the tension between the German and the French aesthetic traditions.

Archeology of a Political Unconscious

Archeology of a Political Unconscious PDF Author: Jennifer Anne Williams
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 237

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Book Description
In the landscape of ruined streets, towering cranes and incomplete buildings under perpetual reconstruction that constituted East Berlin, what kind of space did the theater provide, and what role did it play in the construction of the new state? To what extent did its language of metaphors and symbols communicate the legitimation of an East German society, or did their ambiguity instead empower artists to challenge it? In pursuit of these questions, this dissertation engages with the aesthetic and political dialectics of East Berlin to examine how its theater and opera stages served as spaces in which artists and audiences acted out, fueled and resisted the troubled construction of political legitimacy through symbolic and material means. Of particular interest is the recurrence of reused theatrical materials in these East Berlin productions: compound, renovated objects that simultaneously encapsulated past and present meanings. At first glance, these materials appear to be vessels for political rhetoric, suggesting the historical trajectory of the new state extended back to the prewar historical moments the reused materials evoked and thereby confirmed a political legitimacy the SED so actively promulgated. However, by expressing both past and present meanings - and in half-finished shapes that mirrored the incompletion of the planned society's political and physical world - these reused theatrical materials also confounded such a linear historical narrative and challenged the very rhetoric it seemed to uphold. With a focus on the work of Bertolt Brecht, this dissertation investigates the reused theatrical material on East Berlin stages in three case studies: Uta Birnbaum's 1967 production of Brecht's Mann ist Mann at the Berliner Ensemble (the reassembled theatrical material), Joachim Herz's 1977 production of Brecht and Kurt Weill's Aufstieg und Fall der Stadt Mahagonny at the Komische Oper (the reconstructed theatrical material) and the work of Heiner Müller that consciously reused Brechtian theatrical material (the sublime theatrical material). In each instance, the reused theatrical material dialectically expressed the contradictions inherent in East German political legitimacy, at once confirming and challenging it.

Archaeology of the Political Unconscious

Archaeology of the Political Unconscious PDF Author: Jennifer Williams (Stage director)
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781032105963
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
"This book investigates the aesthetic and political dialectics of East Berlin to argue how its theatre and opera stages incited artists to act out, fuel and resist the troubled construction of political legitimacy. Each chapter investigates a case study of how leading East Berlin stages excavated fragmentary materials from Weimar dramatist Bertolt Brecht's oeuvre and repurposed them for their post-fascist society: Uta Birnbaum's 1967 Man Equals Man at the Berliner Ensemble, Joachim Herz's 1977 Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny at the Komische Oper, and Heiner Müller's own productions of his trailblazing plays. In each instance, reused theatrical artifacts dialectically expressed the contradictions inherent in East German political legitimacy, at once amplifying and critiquing it. Illuminated by original archival research and translations of letters and artistic ephemera never before published in English, and engaging with alternative East German feminist epistemologies, this book's critical investigation of culture and political legitimacy in the shadow of fascism resonates beyond the Iron Curtain into the twenty-first century. This study will be of great interest to students and scholars in theatre and performance studies, art history, music and German studies"--

Capitalizing History

Capitalizing History PDF Author: Samuel Weber
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description


The Political Unconscious

The Political Unconscious PDF Author: Fredric Jameson
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1136749217
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 322

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Book Description
In this ground-breaking and influential study Fredric Jameson explores the complex place and function of literature within culture. At the time Jameson was actually writing the book, in the mid to late seventies, there was a major reaction against deconstruction and poststructuralism. As one of the most significant literary theorists, Jameson found himself in the unenviable position of wanting to defend his intellectual past yet keep an eye on the future. With this book he carried it off beautifully. A landmark publication, The Political Unconscious takes its place as one of the most meaningful works of the twentieth century.century.

Jameson, Althusser, Marx (RLE Marxism)

Jameson, Althusser, Marx (RLE Marxism) PDF Author: William C. Dowling
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000156060
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 153

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Book Description
Frederic Jameson is widely regarded as one of the most original and influential Marxist critics of the last decades. His most controversial work, The Political Unconscious, had an enormous impact on literary criticism and cultural studies. In Jameson, Althusser, Marx, first published in 1984, Professor Dowling sets out to provide the intellectual background needed for an understanding of Jameson’s argument and its broader implications. He elucidates the unspoken assumptions that are the foundation of Jameson’s thought – assumptions about how the nature of language, of interpretation and of culture – and shows how Jameson attempts to subsume in an expanded Marxism the critical theories of Derrida, Foucault, Deleuze, Lacan and of structuralism and poststructuralism in general. This lively, concise book will be welcomed by anyone interested in current theoretical debates, in Marxist criticism, and in the wide-ranging implications of Marxist cultural theory for the social sciences, the arts and the study of history.

Desire and the Political Unconscious in American Literature

Desire and the Political Unconscious in American Literature PDF Author: Sam B Girgus
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1349207233
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 240

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Book Description


Jameson, Althusser, Marx

Jameson, Althusser, Marx PDF Author: William C. Dowling
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781138900622
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 150

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Book Description
Frederic Jameson is widely regarded as one of the most original and influential Marxist critics of the last decades. His most controversial work, The Political Unconscious, had an enormous impact on literary criticism and cultural studies. In Jameson, Althusser, Marx, first published in 1984, Professor Dowling sets out to provide the intellectual background needed for an understanding of Jameson's argument and its broader implications. He elucidates the unspoken assumptions that are the foundation of Jameson's thought - assumptions about how the nature of language, of interpretation and of culture - and shows how Jameson attempts to subsume in an expanded Marxism the critical theories of Derrida, Foucault, Deleuze, Lacan and of structuralism and poststructuralism in general. This lively, concise book will be welcomed by anyone interested in current theoretical debates, in Marxist criticism, and in the wide-ranging implications of Marxist cultural theory for the social sciences, the arts and the study of history.

Archaeologies of the Future

Archaeologies of the Future PDF Author: Fredric Jameson
Publisher: Verso Books
ISBN: 1789602998
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 688

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Book Description
In an age of globalization characterized by the dizzying technologies of the First World, and the social disintegration of the Third, is the concept of utopia still meaningful? Archaeologies of the Future, Jameson's most substantial work since Postmodernism, Or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, investigates the development of this form since Thomas More, and interrogates the functions of utopian thinking in a post-Communist age. The relationship between utopia and science fiction is explored through the representations of otherness . alien life and alien worlds . and a study of the works of Philip K. Dick, Ursula LeGuin, William Gibson, Brian Aldiss, Kim Stanley Robinson and more. Jameson's essential essays, including "The Desire Called Utopia," conclude with an examination of the opposing positions on utopia and an assessment of its political value today.