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A series of five interlaced, in-depth biographical studies from across the spectrum of writers-turned-spies recruited by the Stasi.
From an award-winning author, the first thorough examination of the important influence of opera on Brecht's writings.Brecht at the Opera looks at the German playwright's lifelong ambivalent engagement with opera. An ardent opera lover in his youth, Brecht later denounced the genre as decadent and irrelevant to modern society even as he continued to work on opera projects throughout his career. He completed three operas and attempted two dozen more with composers such as Kurt Weill, Paul Hindemith, Hanns Eisler, and Paul Dessau. Joy H. Calico argues that Brecht's simultaneous work on opera and Lehrstück in the 1920s generated the new concept of audience experience that would come to define epic theater, and that his revisions to the theory of Gestus in the mid-1930s are reminiscent of nineteenth-century opera performance practices of mimesis. From an award-winning author, the first thorough examination of the important influence of opera on Brecht's writings.Brecht at the Opera looks at the German playwright's lifelong ambivalent engagement with opera. An ardent opera lover in his youth, Brech
The publication of this volume of essays marks the centenary of the birth of Bertolt Brecht on 10 February 1898. The essays were commissioned from scholars and critics around the world, and cover six main areas: recent biographical controversies; neglected theoretical writings; the semiotics of Brechtian theatre; new readings of classic texts; Brecht's role and reception in the GDR; and contemporary appropriations of Brecht's work. This volume will be essential reading for all those interested in twentieth century theatre, modern German studies, and the contemporary reassessment of post-war culture in the wake of German unification and the collapse of Stalinist communism in Central and Eastern Europe. The essays in this volume also address a variety of general questions, concerning - for example - authorship and textuality; the nature of Brecht's Marxism in relation to his understanding of modernity, science and Enlightenment reason; Marxist aesthetics; radical cultural politics; and feminist performance theory.
Shows how Adler, Wander, Hilsenrath, and Klüger intertwine transgressive political criticism with the shadow of trauma, revealing new perspectives on canon formation and exclusion in postwar German literature. How did German-speaking Holocaust survivors pursue literary careers in an often-indifferent postwar society? How did their literary life writings reflect their postwar struggles? This monograph focuses on four authors who bore literary witness to the Shoah - H. G. Adler, Fred Wander, Edgar Hilsenrath, and Ruth Klüger. It analyzes their autofictional, critical, and autobiographical works written between the early 1950s and 2015, which depict their postwar experiences of writing, publi...
The publication of this volume of essays marks the centenary of the birth of Bertolt Brecht on 10 February 1898. The essays were commissioned from scholars and critics around the world, and cover six main areas: recent biographical controversies; neglected theoretical writings; the semiotics of Brechtian theatre; new readings of classic texts; Brecht’s role and reception in the GDR; and contemporary appropriations of Brecht’s work. This volume will be essential reading for all those interested in twentieth century theatre, modern German studies, and the contemporary reassessment of post-war culture in the wake of German unification and the collapse of Stalinist communism in Central and Eastern Europe. The essays in this volume also address a variety of general questions, concerning - for example - authorship and textuality; the nature of Brecht’s Marxism in relation to his understanding of modernity, science and Enlightenment reason; Marxist aesthetics; radical cultural politics; and feminist performance theory.
This updated Companion offers students crucial guidance on virtually every aspect of the work of this complex and controversial writer. It brings together the contrasting views of major critics and active practitioners, and this edition introduces more voices and themes. The opening essays place Brecht's creative work in its historical and biographical context and are followed by chapters on single texts, from The Threepenny Opera to The Caucasian Chalk Circle, on some early plays and on the Lehrstücke. Other essays analyse Brecht's directing, his poetry, his interest in music and his work with actors. This revised edition also contains additional essays on his early experience of cabaret, his significance in the development of film theory and his unique approach to dramaturgy. A detailed calendar of Brecht's life and work and a selective bibliography of English criticism complete this provocative overview of a writer who constantly aimed to provoke.
This study, the first of its kind in English, sets out to analyse literature as a form of social communication by considering developments in literary theory and practice in the German Democratic Republic in the Honecker era. Attention focuses on the changes in the discourses of literary theory and literary practice in a semi-public sphere controlled by an increasingly ossified political discourse. Key developments in the 1970s, hailed by GDR theorists as the point of departure for a new kind of literary communication in society, are carefully examined. The study then contrasts these idealised views of literature as social communication with practice and theory in the late 1970s and 1980s. I...
This critical intervention in the study of the comic investigates how the comic act is also an expressive and performative act that precedes philosophical conceptualisation. The book puts Bergson, philosophy and the body at the centre of its investigation to explore different aspects of the field, from the history and philosophy of comedy to film and psychoanalysis. The volume develops a theoretical and practice-based framework that will be a valuable resource for students, scholars and practitioners alike in the fields of philosophy, literary studies, theatre and performance studies and comedy studies. List of Contributors: Caterina Angela Agus, Fred Dalmasso, Lisabeth During, Xavier Escribano, Giovanni Fusetti, Davide Giovanzana, Josephine Gray, María J. Ortega Máñez, Meg Mumford, Jean-Michel Rabaté, Carolyn Shapiro, Lisa Trahair
London, 1934. Austrian actress Elisabeth Bergner dominated the British theatre scene, poet and director Berthold Viertel shot two successful films for Gaumont British; two great actors from the Weimar era, Conrad Veidt and Fritz Kortner, became well-known faces in English-speaking cinema and the Hungarian journalist Stefan Lorant launched the first ever continental-style illustrated magazine for the British newspaper market. Exploring a phase in the history of Anglo-German relations during which the émigrés from Hitler's Germany were making their influence felt in Britain, Daria Santini traces their presence in London from around 1933 to 1935 when these characters made their presence truly felt, all while the Nazi threat loomed on the horizon.
Hymnische Dichtung gehört zu den ältesten Formen poetischen Ausdrucks. Götter werden angefleht, Helden besungen, die Schönheit gepriesen. Die Texte gestalten zu diesem Zweck ein Sprechen an den Grenzen des Menschen: Sie behaupten, das Äußerste zum Ausdruck zu bringen, was ein Mensch erfahren kann, in anthropologischer, sozialer, formaler, poetologischer und kommunikativer Hinsicht. Hymnische Dichtung ist daher liminale Lyrik. - Die Traditionslinie beginnt in der deutschen Literatur im 18. Jahrhundert bei Klopstock, Goethe, Novalis und Hölderlin. Im 19. Jahrhundert umfasst sie etwa Heine, Platen und Nietzsche; im 20. Jahrhundert wird sie u.a. von George, Rilke, Lasker-Schüler, Celan oder Bachmann fortgeführt. Die vorliegende Arbeit beschreibt diese Geschichte hymnischer Dichtung in der deutschen Literatur erstmals ebenso historisch umfassend wie systematisch präzise.