In this Book

All Theater Is Revolutionary Theater

Book
Benjamin Bennett
2018
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All Theater Is Revolutionary Theater is the first book to consider why, in the Western tradition (and only in the Western tradition), theatrical drama is regarded as its own literary or poetic type, when the criteria needed to differentiate drama from other forms of writing do not resemble the criteria by which types of prose or verse are ordinarily distinguished. Through close readings of such playwrights as Beckett, Brecht, Büchner, Eliot, Shaw, Wedekind, and Robert Wilson, Benjamin Bennett looks at the relationship between literature and drama, identifying typical problems in the development of dramatic literature and exploring how the uncomfortable association with theatrical performance affects the operation of drama in literary history.

Bennett's historical investigations into theoretical works ranging from Aristotle to Artaud, Brecht, and Diderot suggest that the attempt to include drama in the system of Western literature causes certain specific incongruities that, in his view, have the salutary effect of preserving the otherwise endangered possibility of a truly liberal, progressive, or revolutionary literature.

All Theater Is Revolutionary Theater is the first book to consider why, in the Western tradition (and only in the Western tradition), theatrical drama is regarded as its own literary or poetic type, when the criteria needed to differentiate drama from other forms of writing do not resemble the criteria by which types of prose or verse are ordinarily distinguished. Through close readings of such playwrights as Beckett, Brecht, Büchner, Eliot, Shaw, Wedekind, and Robert Wilson, Benjamin Bennett looks at the relationship between literature and drama, identifying typical problems in the development of dramatic literature and exploring how the uncomfortable association with theatrical performance affects the operation of drama in literary history.Bennett's historical investigations into theoretical works ranging from Aristotle to Artaud, Brecht, and Diderot suggest that the attempt to include drama in the system of Western literature causes certain specific incongruities that, in his view, have the salutary effect of preserving the otherwise endangered possibility of a truly liberal, progressive, or revolutionary literature.

Table of Contents

Cover

Title Page, Copyright, Dedication, Epigraph

pp. i-viii

Contents

pp. ix-x

Acknowledgments

pp. xi-xiv

Introduction

pp. 1-10

Part One

CHAPTER ONE Aristotle's Defeat

pp. 13-26

CHAPTER TWO Genre and Drama: The Historical and Theoretical Background

pp. 27-54

Part Two

CHAPTER THREE Brecht's Writing against Writing

pp. 57-75

CHAPTER FOUR Brecht, Artaud, Wedekind, Eliot: The Absence of the Subject

pp. 76-95

CHAPTER FIVE The Theater That Never Was: Georg Büchner and Drama as a Philosophical Experiment

pp. 96-114

CHAPTER SIX Hofmannsthal's Theater of Adaptation

pp. 115-135

CHAPTER SEVEN Diderot, Shaw, Beckett, and the Meaning of Plays

pp. 136-167

CHAPTER EIGHT Performance and the Exposure of Hermeneutics

pp. 168-192

CHAPTER NINE Robert Wilson and the Work as an Empty Wavelength for Its Own Public Discussion

pp. 193-218

Conclusion

pp. 219-222

Appendix. How Buchner Uses and Conceives of Thomas Paine (Payne) in Dantons Tod

pp. 223-226

Notes

pp. 227-238

Index

pp. 239-241
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