All Theater is Revolutionary Theater

Front Cover
Cornell University Press, 2005 - 241 pages

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.

 

Contents

CHAPTER
13
CHAPTER
27
Brechts Writing against Writing
57
CHAPTER FOUR
76
Georg Büchner and Drama as a Philosophical Experiment
96
CHAPTER
115
CHAPTER SEVEN
136
CHAPTER EIGHT
168
CHAPTER NINE
193
Conclusion
219
Notes
237
Copyright

Other editions - View all

Common terms and phrases

About the author (2005)

Benjamin Bennett is Kenan Professor of German at the University of Virginia. His many books include Theater As Problem: Modern Drama and Its Place in Literature, Beyond Theory: Eighteenth-Century German Literature and the Poetics of Irony (both from Cornell), and Goethe as Woman: The Undoing of Literature. His first book, Modern Drama and German Classicism: Renaissance from Lessing to Brecht (also from Cornell), won the MLA's James Russell Lowell Prize.

Bibliographic information