Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-r5fsc Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-25T01:10:20.236Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Crude Thinking: John Fuegi and Recent Brecht Criticism

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  15 January 2009

Olga Taxidou
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

ALL LEFT-WING cultural practitioners and theoreticians have, at one time or another, been accused of Stalinism. Indeed, in many cases, this charge has to be taken on board, particularly after the collapse of existing state socialism. During the first few decades of this century most cultural activities, schools, and theories in many ways defined themselves within the context of existing or imaginary and utopian marxisms.

Type
Research Article
Information
New Theatre Quarterly , Volume 11 , Issue 44 , November 1995 , pp. 381 - 384
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1995

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Notes and References

1. This is a view that Martin Esslin has been voicing for years in all his works on Brecht. For Esslin, reassessing Brecht mainly involves ‘rescuing (him) from those rather obtuse orthodoxies that proclaimed the excellence of this theatre as a palpable proof that Stalinisttype communism worked’, as he stated in his review of Thomson, Peter and Sacks, Glendyr, The Cambridge Companion to Brecht, in Plays International, 07 1994Google Scholar.

2. See Butler, Judith, Gender Trouble: Feminsim and the Subversion of Identity (Routledge, 1990)Google Scholar.

3. For an account of Benjamin's relationship with Brecht, see Wolin, Richard, Walter Benjamin: an Aesthetic of Redemption (University of California Press, 1994), p. 139–54Google Scholar.

4. Wright, Elizabeth, Postmodern Brecht: a Re-Presentation (Routledge, 1989)Google Scholar.

5. See Fuegi, John, The Lives and Lies of Bertolt Brecht (Harper Collins, 1994), p. 148Google Scholar.

6. See Diamond, Elin, ‘Brechtian Theory/Feminist Theory: Toward a Gestic Feminist Criticism’, The Drama Review, XXXII, No. 1 (1988), p. 82–91CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

7. See Wright, Elizabeth, ‘The Good Person of Szechwan: Discourse of a Masquerade’, in Thomson, Peter and Sacks, Glendyr, eds., The Cambridge Companion to Brecht (Cambridge University Press, 1994), p. 117–28CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

8. See Campioni, Mia and Gross, Elizabeth, ‘Love's Labour's Lost: Marxism and Feminism’, in Gunew, Sneja, ed., A Reader in Feminist Knowledge (Routledge), p. 336–97Google Scholar.

9. Elin Diamond, op. cit. See also Smith, Iris, ‘Brecht and the Mothers of Epic Theatre’, Theatre Journal, XLIII, No. 4 (12 1991), p. 491–505CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and Lennox, Sara, ‘Women in Brecht's Work’, New German Critique, XIV (Spring 1978), p. 83–96CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

10. Elin Diamond, op. cit., p. 90.

11. Ibid.

12. John Fuegi, op. cit., p. 126.

13. Dolan, Jill, ‘Personal, Political, Polemical: Approaches to Politics and Theatre’, in Holderness, Graham, ed., The Politics of Theatre and Drama (Macmillan, 1992), p. 44–65, 50CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

14. Weber, Carl, ‘AC/TC – Currents of Theatrical Exchange’, in Performing Arts Journal, Nos. 33–34 (1989), p. 11–21Google Scholar.

15. Peter Thomson, ‘Brecht's Lives’, in The Cambridge Companion to Brecht, op. cit., p. 22–39.

16. See Fuegi, op. cit., p. 621.