Zum Hauptinhalt springen
Nicht aus der Schweiz? Besuchen Sie lehmanns.de
Understanding Brecht - Walter Benjamin

Understanding Brecht

(Autor)

Buch | Softcover
144 Seiten
2003
Verso Books (Verlag)
978-1-85984-418-2 (ISBN)
CHF 22,65 inkl. MwSt
zur Neuauflage
  • Titel erscheint in neuer Auflage
  • Artikel merken
Zu diesem Artikel existiert eine Nachauflage
In this volume we find collected together Benjamin's most sensitive and probing writing on the dramatic and poetic work of his friend and tutor Bertolt Brecht. Benjamin's work still exerts an influence over philosophical and cultural thinking today.
The relationship between philosopher-critic Walter Benjamin and playwright-poet Bertolt Brecht was both a lasting friendship and a powerful intellectual partnership. Having met in the late 1920s in Germany, Benjamin and Brecht both independently minded Marxists with a deep understanding of and passionate commitment to the emancipatory potential of cultural practices continued to discuss, argue and correspond on topics as varied as Fascism and the work of Franz Kafka. Faced by the onset of the 'midnight of the century', with the Nazi subversion of the Weimar Republic in Germany and the Stalinist degeneration of the revolution in Russia, both men, in their own way, strove to keep alive the tradition of dialectical critique of the existing order and radical intervention in the world to transform it.
In Understanding Brecht we find collected together Benjamin's most sensitive and probing writing on the dramatic and poetic work of his friend and tutor. Stimulated by Brecht's oeuvre and theorising his particular dramatic techniques-such as the famous 'estrangement effect'-Benjamin developed his own ideas about the role of art and the artist in crisis-ridden society. This volume contains Benjamin's introductions to Brecht's theory or epic theatre and close textual analyses of twelve poems by Brecht (printed in translation here) which exemplify Benjamin's insistence that literary form and content are indivisible. Elsewhere Benjamin discusses the plays The Mother, Terror and Misery of the Third Reich, and The Threepenny Opera, digressing for some general remarks on Marx and satire.
Here we also find Benjamin's masterful essay "The Author as Producer" as well as an extract from his diaries that records the intense conversations held in the late 1930s in Denmark (Brecht's place of exile) between the two most important cultural theorists of this century. In these discussions, the two men talked of subjects as diverse as the work of Franz Kafka, the unfolding Soviet Trials, and the problems of literary work on the edge of international war.

Walter Benjamin was a German-Jewish Marxist literary critic, essayist, translator, and philosopher. He was at times associated with the Frankfurt School of critical theory and is the author of Illuminations, The Arcades Project, and The Origin of German Tragic Drama.

Erscheint lt. Verlag 2.9.2003
Einführung Stanley Mitchell
Übersetzer Anna Bostock
Verlagsort London
Sprache englisch
Maße 130 x 182 mm
Gewicht 175 g
Themenwelt Geisteswissenschaften Sprach- / Literaturwissenschaft Anglistik / Amerikanistik
Geisteswissenschaften Sprach- / Literaturwissenschaft Literaturwissenschaft
ISBN-10 1-85984-418-9 / 1859844189
ISBN-13 978-1-85984-418-2 / 9781859844182
Zustand Neuware
Informationen gemäß Produktsicherheitsverordnung (GPSR)
Haben Sie eine Frage zum Produkt?
Mehr entdecken
aus dem Bereich

von Ritchie Robertson

Buch | Softcover (2025)
Reaktion Books (Verlag)
CHF 25,90
Poetik eines sozialen Urteils

von Nora Weinelt

Buch | Hardcover (2023)
De Gruyter (Verlag)
CHF 83,90
Stories

von Lydia Millet

Buch | Hardcover (2025)
WW Norton & Co (Verlag)
CHF 38,90