ENGL 459: The Brechtian Revolution ~ Dr. Hatch
In this seminar, we will examine the work of twentieth-century German playwright, poet, novelist, theorist, and director Bertolt Brecht (1898 – 1956). Brecht is an essential modernist figure who deserves our critical attention for a great many reasons, chief among them the fact that no one has had a more radical or widespread impact on twentieth and twenty-first century theatre. In fact, no modern theatre artist has had remotely as major an impact on the arts in general. As theatre scholar Martin Puchner writes, “Brecht overhauled each and every aspect of the theatre, leaving nothing untouched.” Yet this complete “overhaul” was not innovation for innovation’s sake. On the contrary, Brecht’s transformation of his medium was an effort to reimagine its power to transform society. A committed though heterodox Marxist, Brecht wished for his theatre to do more than simply re-present political situations at the level of its content. Rather, he wanted his plays themselves to be political situations — and thus to overcome the boundaries separating art from activism, and from life in general. To this end, he developed what he called the epic theatre, an emphatically modern approach to theatrical form that broke with the Western, Aristotelian tradition of dramatic theatre in order to meet the needs of modern spectators. It is in this sense that the literary and cultural theorist Roland Barthes wrote of “the Brechtian Revolution.” Our task this quarter is to become students of this revolution, to discover its nature, stakes, powers, and limits. This means finding out why Brecht’s epic theatre still matters and speculating on what forms his legacy might take in the twenty-first century.
We will read Brecht’s plays alongside the theoretical texts through which he formalized the revolution of his theatrical practice. We will conclude the quarter by exploring the implications of Brecht’s innovations for contemporary feminist and anti-racist theatrical practice, through examinations of British socialist feminist playwright Caryl Churchill’s Top Girls (1982) and Korean American avant-garde playwright Young Jean Lee’s The Shipment (2009).