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/lit/ - Literature

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16496314 No.16496314 [Reply] [Original]

So I am reading Mother Courage and Her Children by Bertolt Brecht this week for my Modern and Contemporary Drama class (we just finished Strindberg, Ibsen, Shaw, and O'Neill) and I was wondering what /lit/ thinks of Brecht? I have never read him and am only familiar with him in relation to the Frankfurt School and other Marxists. Is he a good playwright? After him we're onto Beckett (who's one of my personal favourites).

>> No.16496420

I think he's very good. I like his characterizations, where everyone is reduced to a type (which they often are in writing but not intentionally.) I'm a worker; whereas I am a thief; me I'm a patriot; and I am a banker. And you just see the consequences of acting a social role. (The beginning of the movie Gremlins is like that actually.) He's a caricaturist with a deadly serious point, I guess what a Satirist was to Rome. The George Grosz of drama. This podcast was worth a listen: https://open.spotify.com/episode/5gDNOETGOTnNDx6cajl4I4?si=0xTdGsSiSpKfMLR7WHuNPg

>> No.16496461

>>16496314
I always wonder if marxists actually find him to be unironically good or if they are just blowing smoke up his ass because he's such a braindead tankie. Seriously, imagine if by some change of fate he would have ended up shilling for the third reich with the exact same fervor and bluntness in an alternate universe, would he have been jacked off just as hard?

>> No.16496474

>>16496314
Had a similar class not all that long ago but Chekhov and Shaw were the foci of my seminars and papers. Liked both Courage and Galileo, however- what I remember of the former was how perplexed Brecht himself became at audience after audience's sympathetic response to MC the character, a situation he had not intended (according to the man himself).

>> No.16496481

>>16496461
Plenty of fascist artists are praised.

>> No.16496514

>>16496481
Of course, but practically none of them can be reduced to FASCISM GOOD GOMMUNIZM BAD :DDD like Brecht can be reduced to CAPITALISM/FASCISM BAD COMMUNISM GOOD.

The usual response to this is muh V-effekt, his works about drama theory, etc, but just because something is only pretending to be retarded, it's still retarded. Crappy theatre that is self-aware is still crappy. I'm actually kinda perplexed by the sheer autism of the man, just how one-dimensional a man's vision can be?

>> No.16496575

>>16496474
Huh, I'll keep that in mind while I read/watch the play! Thanks a bunch.

>>16496420
And thank you so much for the podcast!