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:
ISBN:
Category : Communism and literature
Languages : en
Pages : 305

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Book Description


Archaeology of the Political Unconscious

Archaeology of the Political Unconscious PDF Author: Jennifer Williams (Stage director)
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781003216148
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"--

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.

Arts of Living

Arts of Living PDF Author: Kurt Spellmeyer
Publisher: SUNY Press
ISBN: 9780791456484
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 328

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Book Description
Argues that higher education needs to abandon the “culture wars” if it hopes to address the major crises of the century.

The History of Ancient Israel: A Guide for the Perplexed

The History of Ancient Israel: A Guide for the Perplexed PDF Author: Philip R. Davies
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 0567655830
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 201

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Book Description
The History of Ancient Israel: A Guide for the Perplexed provides the student with the perfect guide to why and how the history of this most contested region has been studies, and why it continues to be studied today. Philip R. Davies, one of the leading scholars of Ancient Israel in recent years, begins by examining the relevance of the study of Ancient Israel, giving an overview of the sources and issues facing historians in approaching the material. Davies then continues by looking at the various theories and hypotheses that scholars have advanced throughout the 20th century, showing how different approaches are presented and in some cases how they are both underpinned and undermined by a range of ideological perspectives. Davies also explains the rise and fall of Biblical Archaeology, the 'maximalist/minimalist' debate. After this helpful survey of past methodologies Davies introduces readers to the current trends in biblical scholarship in the present day, covering areas such as cultural memory, the impact of literary and social scientific theory, and the notion of 'invented history'. Finally, Davies considers the big question: how the various sources of knowledge can be combined to write a modern history that combines and accounts for all the data available, in a meaningful way. This new guide will be a must for students of the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament.

The Ends of History

The Ends of History PDF Author: Christina Crosby
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1136248315
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 202

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Book Description
Why were the Victorians so passionate about "History"? How did this passion relate to another Victorian obsession – the "woman question"? In a brilliant and provocative study, Christina Crosby investigates the links between the Victorians’ fascination with "history" and with the nature of "women." Discussing both key novels and non-literary texts – Daniel Deronda and Hegel’s Philosophy of History; Henry Esmond and Macaulay’s History of England; Little Dorrit, Wilkie Collins’ The Frozen Deep, and Mayhew’s survey of "labour and the poor"; Villette, Patrick Fairburn’s The Typology of Scripture and Ruskin’s Modern Painters – she argues that the construction of middle-class Victorian "man" as the universal subject of history entailed the identification of "women" as those who are before, beyond, above, or below history. Crosby’s analysis raises a crucial question for today’s feminists – how can one read historically without replicating the problem of nineteenth century "history"? The book was first published in 1991.

The History and Narrative Reader

The History and Narrative Reader PDF Author: Geoffrey Roberts
Publisher: Psychology Press
ISBN: 9780415232494
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 470

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Book Description
Are historians story-tellers? Is it possible to tell true stories about the past? These are just two of the questions raised in this comprehensive collection of texts about philosophy, theory and methodology of writing history.

Archaeology After Structuralism

Archaeology After Structuralism PDF Author: Ian Bapty
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 131761660X
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 323

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Book Description
Most practising archaeologists have preferred to leave the deep theories of what lies behind their methods and perceptions on one side. Now archaeologists have faced up to the difficult task of making (or not making) the connections between the past, interpretation and the present. The writers of this volumes address the problems of archaeology, sometimes warily and sometimes with enthusiasm. The connections are not easy to accomplish: a great deal of theory seems of little relevance to the everyday practice of archaeology, and much of post-structuralism refers exclusively back to itself rather than to the more specific concerns of a historical discipline. But where the junction between post-structuralism and archaeology can be made, the results are innovative and enriching. Originally published in 1990.