2020/06/30 by Sean Carney · 1 citation
Arts and Humanities · #Theatre and Performance Studies
paper · doi:10.4324/9781003060383-2
openalex publication_date 2020/06/30 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/29
In this chapter the author argues that the importance of Brecht’s aesthetic theory is directly dependent on the influence of Marxism on his thought. In a dialectical relationship between the past and the present, wherein the past is not just perceived as the producer of the present, but the present, in a very real way, is also the producer of the past, Brecht must be reinvented, refigured within new paradigms and new problems. It is specifically the theory and technique of the Verfremdungseffekt that Wright argues have become ubiquitous today, and thus have become ineffective, rendering Brecht’s theatre obsolete. The goal of psychoanalysis, as opposed to psychopathological theatre, is to allow the analyse and to properly take stock of what is happening, in the broadest possible sense, a goal shared with Brecht’s theory of ‘antiaristotelian’ theatre. In structuralist psychoanalytic theory, it is language itself that introduces the possibility of historicization.