The legacy of Bertolt Brecht is much contested, whether by those who wish to forget or to vilify his politics, but his stature as the outstanding political playwright and poet of the twentieth century is unforgettably established in this major critical work. Fredric Jameson elegantly dissects the intricate connections between Brecht's drama and politics, demonstrating the way these combined to shape a unique and powerful influence on a profoundly troubled epoch.

Jameson sees Brecht's method as a multilayered process of reflection and self-reflection, reference and self-reference, which tears open a gap for individuals to situate themselves historically, to think about themselves in the third person, and to use that self-projection in history as a basis for judgement. Emphasising the themes of separation, distance, multiplicity, choice and contradiction in Brecht's entire corpus, Jameson's study engages in a dialogue with a cryptic work, unpublished in Brecht's lifetime, entitled Me-ti: Book of Twists and Turns. This text is seen by Jameson as key to understanding Brecht's critical reflections on dialectics and his orientally informed fascination with flow and flux, change and the noneternal.

For Jameson, Brecht is not prescriptive but performative. His plays do not provide answers but attempt to show people how to perform the act of thinking, how to begin to search for answers themselves. Brecht represents the ceaselessness of transformation while at the same time alienating it, interrupting it, making it comprehensible by making it strange. And thereby, in breaking it up by analysis, the possibility emerges of its reconstitution under a new law.

“Probably the most important cultural critic writing in English today ... It can be truly said that nothing cultural is alien to him.” — Colin MacCabe

Fredric Jameson is Distinguished Professor of Comparative Literature at Duke University. He is the author of many works, including, from Verso, the classic Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism; Late Marxism: Adorno, or, The Persistence of the Dialectic; and most recently the collection The Cultural Turn. His Valences of the Dialectic is forthcoming from Verso.


 

 Publication
Cloth: September 1998
Paper: December 1999

280 pages

Cloth
ISBN-10: 1 85984 809 5
£19 / US$25

Paper
ISBN-13: 1 85984 249 2
£13 / US$19 / CAN$26

Also available:

A Singular Modernity

The Cultural Turn: Selected Writings on the Postmodern, 1983–1998

Late Marxism: Adorno,or the Persistence of the Dialectic

Postmodernism: or; The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism