Brecht and the Aesthetics of Resistance

Bertolt Brecht was a prolific and influential avant-garde writer and artist, making profound contributions to theater, theories of performance, aesthetic philosophy, political and literary analysis, and poetry. His oeuvre responds to some of the greatest upheavals of the twentieth century—two world wars, the rise of Nazism, Stalinism—and engages with the world at large. As political commitments were inseparable from his artistic purposes, his work reflects on the prospects for art to realize a political vision. The question of art and politics hinges, for Brecht, upon the nature of artifice, and the way its uses and effects render the conditions of experience knowable—and so transformable. Brecht’s theater emphasizes the appearance of structure: in the laying bare of the lighting apparatus on stage, for example, or in quotation as central to an actor’s speech, one awakens attention to unjust conditions and avoids the hypnotic seduction of ideological slumber. As such, Brecht developed an anti-Aristotelian, anti-empathetic, and anti-naturalist aesthetic theory, one that sought instead to apply Marx’s analytic methods to the function of the artwork. Refusing to exempt it from power, Brecht showed how western cultural production participate in the very arrangements that make capitalist exploitation possible. Through its illusory devices, bourgeois culture creates the appearance of universal human connection while obscuring the relations that maintain the social and economic dominance of the ruling class.

In this seminar we will explore how Brecht reconceptualized our understanding of the tensions and conflicts within aesthetics as a practice and theory embedded in social and political reality. We will read his aesthetic and political writings, paying close attention to his theory of epic theater and the Alienation-effect; his cognitive realism, developed in explicit opposition to naturalism and Aristotelian mimetic empathy; his conception of the role of the spectator in art; his analysis of fascism, his anti-Nazi writings, and related concerns. Questions we will consider include: How did Brecht’s theories seek to render inequalities visible on stage? How does his approach to theater reframe our understanding of rationality (and irrationality)? How do our emotions emerge in and through history? How has Brecht transformed ideas about the avant-garde? How did he understand science as an aesthetic mode and as a formal attitude of mind capable of being repurposed for the formation of a political consciousness? In addition to his essays on political and aesthetic subjects, we will read four plays — The Threepenny Opera (his most commercially successful work, in collaboration with Kurt Weill), Life of Galileo, The Caucasian Chalk Circle, and The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui — as well as a selection of poems. Finally, we will study Walter Benjamin’s essay on Brecht, “What is Epic Theatre?” and texts that significantly shaped his aesthetic and political positions: Georg Lukács’s “Expressionism: Its Significance and Decline” and selections from Marx.