In this Book
All Theater Is Revolutionary Theater

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
Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Part One
CHAPTER ONE Aristotle's Defeat
CHAPTER TWO Genre and Drama: The Historical and Theoretical Background
Part Two
CHAPTER THREE Brecht's Writing against Writing
CHAPTER FOUR Brecht, Artaud, Wedekind, Eliot: The Absence of the Subject
CHAPTER FIVE The Theater That Never Was: Georg Büchner and Drama as a Philosophical Experiment
CHAPTER SIX Hofmannsthal's Theater of Adaptation
CHAPTER SEVEN Diderot, Shaw, Beckett, and the Meaning of Plays
CHAPTER EIGHT Performance and the Exposure of Hermeneutics
CHAPTER NINE Robert Wilson and the Work as an Empty Wavelength for Its Own Public Discussion
Conclusion
Appendix. How Buchner Uses and Conceives of Thomas Paine (Payne) in Dantons Tod
Notes
Index
ISBN | 9781501720994 |
---|---|
Related ISBN(s) | 9780801443091 |
MARC Record | Download |
OCLC | 1080550540 |
Pages | 260 |
Launched on MUSE | 2019-01-02 |
Language | English |
Open Access | No |