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Philosophizing Brecht
This interdisciplinary anthology unites scholars with the notion that Bertolt Brecht is a missing link in bridging diverse discourses in social philosophy and aesthetics—an essential read for all those interested in Brecht as a socio-cultural theorist and theatre practitioners.
An Introduction to the Social and Political Philosophy of Bertolt Brecht
This book presents Brecht’s thought in the context of a revolutionary Marxist aesthetic and explores his vision of consciousness as it relates to historical materialism, the dialectic of enlightenment, social ontology, epistemology and ethics.
The Politics of the Sacred in America
This book provides a comprehensive investigation of the political dimensions of civil religion in the United States. By employing an original social-psychological theory rooted in semiotics, it offers a qualitative and quantitative empirical examination of more than fifty years of political rhetoric. Further, it presents two in-depth case studies that examine how the cultural, totemic sign of ‘the Founding Fathers’ and the signs of America’s sacred texts (the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence) are used in attempts to link partisan policy positions with notions that the country collectively holds sacred. The book’s overarching thesis is that America’s civil religion serves as a discursive framework for the country’s politics of the sacred, mediating the demands of particularistic interests and social solidarity through the interaction of social belief and institutional politics like elections and the Supreme Court. The book penetrates America’s unique political religiosity to reveal and unravel the intricate ways in which politics, political institutions, religion and culture intertwine in the United States.
Engaging with Brecht
This book makes the case for Bertolt Brecht’s continued importance at a time when events of the 21st century cry out for a studied means of producing theatre for social change. Here is a unique step-by-step process for realizing Brecht’s ways of working onstage using the 2015 Texas Tech University production of Brecht’s Mother Courage and Her Children as a model for exploration. Particular Brecht concepts—the epic, Verfremdung, the Fabel, gestus, historicization, literarization, the “Not...but,” Arrangement, and the Separation of the Elements—are explained and applied to scenes and plays. Brecht’s complicated relationship with Konstantin Stanislavsky is also explored in relation to their separate views on acting. For theatrical practitioners and educators, this volume is a record of pedagogical engagement, an empirical study of Brecht’s work in performance at a higher institution of learning using graduate and undergraduate students.
Chinese Adaptations of Brecht
This book examines the two-way impacts between Brecht and Chinese culture and drama/theatre, focusing on Chinese theatrical productions since the end of the Cultural Revolution all the way to the first decades of the twenty-first century. Wei Zhang considers how Brecht’s plays have been adapted/appropriated by Chinese theatre artists to speak to the sociopolitical, economic, and cultural developments in China and how such endeavors reflect and result from dynamic interactions between Chinese philosophy, ethics, and aesthetics, especially as embodied in traditional xiqu and the Brechtian concepts of estrangement (Verfremdungseffekt) and political theatre. In examining these Brecht adaptations, Zhang offers an interdisciplinary study that contributes to the fields of comparative drama/theatre studies, intercultural studies, and performance studies.
Madness and Insanity
Madness and Insanity is the story of David a recent graduate and embarrassment to his father. After an untimely arrest he is exiled to Manchester, England, a place notorious for its culture of drunken fornication and music. There, David is assimilated into an eccentric group of international students and swept into a farcical lifestyle of drugs, casual sex and indifference. David terms this lifestyle Madness and Insanity and begins flirting with its extremes, ultimately finding himself planning the robbery of a scientific lab to win the affection of an aloof, lab assistant he fancies. Faced with the debacle of the robbery and the increasing role of drugs and alcohol in his life, David quixotically embarks on an adventure to come to grips with Madness and Insanity. He searches for its meaning in a escalating combination of drugs, alcohol and self-deprivation that nearly kills him. He ends up however, discovering something quite unexpected.
Dialogues, Dramas, and Emotions
Drawing ideas from the works of George Herbert Mead, Mikhail Bakhtin, Kenneth Burke, and the American pragmatic philosophers, Dialogues, Dramas, and Emotions: Essays in Interactionist Sociology argues that the verbal interactions of human agents are characterized by addresses and rejoinders, which Bakhtin called dialogues. These moves conform to what Burke called dramatism. Robert Perinbanayagam uses examples both from dramatic literature and everyday conversations to demonstrate how everyday interactions are inescapably dramas, conducted through the use of dialogues in order to promote mutual understanding. Along with analyzing the dialogues themselves, the author also examines what comes to play in these interactions and shows the various consequences of these emotionalities in ongoing human relationships.
Understanding Pope Francis
Understanding Pope Francis: Message, Media, andAudienceoffers several chapters which illuminate the often misunderstood, but widely discussed, leader of the Roman Catholic Church, Pope Francis. With 1.3 billion baptized members living throughout every continent, communication by and about him is a subject deserving to be understood. As technology makes the “global village” predicted by Marshall McLuhan more apparent, the complexities of leading an organization across geographic boundaries with differing ideas about culture and governance present great need to be nuanced, indeed cautious, about messages communicated across diverse media platforms and consumed by divergent audiences. This book lays bare the messages Pope Francis produces, the way that varying platforms/media present those messages, and the complex ways in which audiences formulate their interpretations.
