Brecht, a Choice of Evils

Brecht, a Choice of Evils PDF Author: Martin Esslin
Publisher: Methuen Drama
ISBN:
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 344

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Book Description
This text is Brecht's series of 24 inter-connected playlets that describe events which took place in German households before his own exile in 1936. They describe the suspicion and anxiety experienced by people as the power of Hitler grew.

Brecht, a Choice of Evils

Brecht, a Choice of Evils PDF Author: Martin Esslin
Publisher: Methuen Drama
ISBN:
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 344

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Book Description
This text is Brecht's series of 24 inter-connected playlets that describe events which took place in German households before his own exile in 1936. They describe the suspicion and anxiety experienced by people as the power of Hitler grew.

Brecht

Brecht PDF Author: Martin Esslin
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description


Stage Fright

Stage Fright PDF Author: Martin Puchner
Publisher: JHU Press
ISBN: 0801877768
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 247

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Book Description
Grounded equally in discussions of theater history, literary genre, and theory, Martin Puchner's Stage Fright: Modernism, Anti-Theatricality, and Drama explores the conflict between avant-garde theater and modernism. While the avant-garde celebrated all things theatrical, a dominant strain of modernism tended to define itself against the theater, valuing lyric poetry and the novel instead. Defenders of the theater dismiss modernism's aversion to the stage and its mimicking actors as one more form of the old "anti-theatrical" prejudice. But Puchner shows that modernism's ambivalence about the theater was shared even by playwrights and directors and thus was a productive force responsible for some of the greatest achievements in dramatic literature and theater. A reaction to the aggressive theatricality of Wagner and his followers, the modernist backlash against the theater led to the peculiar genre of the closet drama—a theatrical piece intended to be read rather than staged—whose long-overlooked significance Puchner traces from the theatrical texts of Mallarmé and Stein to the dramatic "Circe" chapter of Joyce's Ulysses. At times, then, the anti-theatrical impulse leads to a withdrawal from the theater. At other times, however, it returns to the stage, when Yeats blends lyric poetry with Japanese Nôh dancers, when Brecht controls the stage with novelistic techniques, and when Beckett buries his actors in barrels and behind obsessive stage directions. The modernist theater thus owes much to the closet drama whose literary strategies it blends with a new mise en scène. While offering an alternative history of modernist theater and literature, Puchner also provides a new account of the contradictory forces within modernism.

An Anatomy of Drama

An Anatomy of Drama PDF Author: Martin Esslin
Publisher: Macmillan
ISBN: 0809005506
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 130

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Book Description


Brecht Unbound

Brecht Unbound PDF Author: James K. Lyon
Publisher: University of Delaware Press
ISBN: 9780874135374
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 324

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Book Description
"Except for the annual Brecht Yearbook, Brecht Unbound represents the first broad critical study of Brecht's works to appear in the United States since before the fall of the Berlin Wall. Intended to move beyond the ideological considerations that have informed so much secondary literature about Brecht, the book is a cross-disciplinary reassessment of important aspects of his work. Included are essays on his poetry, drama, theoretical writings, Brecht's influence on American film techniques and music, his relationship to and borrowings from Japanese No theater, and a comparison between aesthetic techniques in his writings and Stravinsky's "The Little Soldier.""--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved

Brecht-Jahrbuch

Brecht-Jahrbuch PDF Author: Theodore F. Rippey
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer
ISBN: 0985195649
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 328

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Book Description
Alongside the usual wide-ranging lineup of research articles, volume 41 features an interview with Berliner Ensemble actor Annemone Haase and an extensive special section on teaching Brecht. Now published for the International Brecht Society by Camden House, the Brecht Yearbook is the central scholarly forum for discussion of Bertolt Brecht's life and work and of topics of particular interest to Brecht, especially the politics of literature and of theater in a global context. It includes a wide variety of perspectives and approaches, and, like Brecht himself, is committed to the concept of the use value of literature, theater, and theory. Volume 41 features an interview with longtime Berliner Ensemble actor Annemone Haase by Margaret Setje-Eilers. A special section on teaching Brecht, guest-edited by Per Urlaub and Kristopher Imbrigotta, includes articles on creative appropriation in the foreign-language classroom (Caroline Weist), satire in Arturo Ui and The Great Dictator (Ari Linden), performative discussion (Cohen Ambrose), Brecht for theater majors (Daniel Smith), teaching performance studies with the Lehrstück model (Ian Maxwell), Verfremdung and ethics (Elena Pnevmonidou), Brecht on the college stage (Julie Klassen and Ruth Weiner), and methods of teaching Brechtian Stückschreiben (Gerd Koch). Other research articles focus on Harry Smith's Mahagonny (Marc Silberman), inhabiting empathy in the contemporary piece Temping (James Ball), Brecht's appropriation of Kurt Lewin's psychology (Ines Langemeyer), and Brecht's collaborations with women, both across his career (Helen Fehervary) and in exile in Skovsbostrand (Katherine Hollander). Editor Theodore F. Rippey is Associate Professor of German at Bowling Green State University.

Brecht Collected Plays: 5

Brecht Collected Plays: 5 PDF Author: Bertolt Brecht
Publisher: A&C Black
ISBN: 1472538552
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 448

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Book Description
Published by Methuen Drama, the collected dramatic works of Bertolt Brecht are presented in the most comprehensive and authoritative editions of Brecht's plays in the English language. The fifth volume in the Brecht Collected Plays series brings together two of Brecht's best-known and most frequently performed and studied plays: Life of Galileo and Mother Courage and Her Children. Galileo, which examines the conflict between free inquiry and official ideology, contains one of Brecht's most human and complex central characters. Temporarily silenced by the Inquisition's threat of torture, and forced to abjure his theories publicly, Galileo continues to work in private, eventually smuggling his work out of the country. As an examination of the problems that face not only the scientist but also the whole spirit of free inquiry when brought into conflict with the requirements of government or official ideology, Life of Galileo has few equals. Mother Courage is usually seen as Brecht's greatest work. Remaining a powerful indictment of war and social injustice, it is an epic drama set in the seventeenth century during the Thirty Years' War. The plot follows the resilient Mother Courage who survives by running a commissary business that profits from all sides. As the war claims all of her children in turn, the play poignantly demonstrates that no one can profit from the war without being subject to its terrible cost also. The translations are ideal for both study and performance. The volume is accompanied by a full introduction and notes by the series editor John Willett and includes Brecht's own notes and relevant texts as well as all the important textual variants.

Brecht Plays 8

Brecht Plays 8 PDF Author: Bertolt Brecht
Publisher: A&C Black
ISBN: 1472538579
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 288

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Book Description
The latest volume in Methuen's Collected Brecht includes two plays previously untranslated into English Volume 8 of Brecht's collected plays contains his last completed plays, from the eight years between his return from America to Europe after the war and his death in 1956. Brecht's ANTIGONE (1948) is a bold adaptation of Holderlin's classic German translation of Sophocles' play. A reflection on resistance and dictatorship in the aftermath of Nazism, it was a radical new experiment in epic theatre. THE DAYS OF THE COMMUNE (1949) is a semi-documentary account of the Paris Commune, and Brecht's most serious and ambitious historical play. TURANDOT is Brecht's version of the classic Chinese story is a satire on the intelligentsia of the Weimar Republic, Nazi bureaucracy, and other targets.

Brecht and Political Theatre

Brecht and Political Theatre PDF Author: Laura Bradley
Publisher: Clarendon Press
ISBN: 0191536776
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 280

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Book Description
This production history of The Mother provides substantial new insights into Bertolt Brecht's theatre and drama, his impact on political theatre, and the relationship between text, performance, and politico-cultural context. As the only play which Brecht staged in the Weimar Republic, during his exile, and in the GDR, The Mother offers a unique opportunity to compare his theatrical practice in contrasting settings and at different points in his career. Through detailed analysis of original archival evidence, Bradley shows how Brecht became far more sensitive to his spectators' political views and cultural expectations, even making major tactical concessions in his 1951 production at the Berliner Ensemble. These compromises indicate that his 'mature' staging should not be regarded as definitive, for it was tailored to a unique and delicate situation. The Mother has appealed strongly to politically committed theatre practitioners both in and beyond Germany. By exploiting the text's generic hybridity and the interplay between Brecht's 'epic' and 'dramatic' elements, directors have interpreted it in radically different ways. So although Brecht's 1951 production stagnated into an affirmative GDR heritage piece, post-Brechtian directors have used The Mother to promote their own political and theatrical concerns, from anti-authoritarian theatre to reflections on the legacies of state Socialism. Their ideological and theatrical subversion have helped Brecht's text to outlive the political system that it came to uphold.

Routledge Revivals: Bertolt Brecht: Dialectics, Poetry, Politics (1988)

Routledge Revivals: Bertolt Brecht: Dialectics, Poetry, Politics (1988) PDF Author: Peter Brooker
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351996045
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 322

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Book Description
First published in 1988, this books argues with received accounts to reclaim Brecht’s emphasis on his self-described ‘dialectical theatre’, re-examining firstly the concepts of Gestus and Verfremdung and their realisation in Brecht’s poetry in terms of his attempt to consciously apply the methods of dialectical materialism to art and cultural practice. The author also takes issue with the customary view of Brecht’s career and politics which sees him as compromising either with Communist party dogma or bourgeois aesthetics, to find developing parallels between Brecht’s political and artistic though and the critical dialectics of Marx, Lenin and Mao. This development is examined in later chapters in relation to the early and late plays, The Measures Taken and Days of the Commune as well as in relation to Brecht’s changed circumstances in the years of war-time exile and in post-war East Germany.