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1 results

  • Chapter 21 - Brecht and East Asia

  • from Part II - Brecht’s Work
  • Edited by Stephen Brockmann, Carnegie Mellon University, Pennsylvania
  • Book:
    Bertolt Brecht in Context
    Published online:
    28 May 2021
    Print publication:
    10 June 2021, pp 182-190

  • Summary

    Comparative cross-disciplinary study shows how East Asian thought, theater, and poetry, while situating cultural analogies, helpedshape Brecht’s work. The narrative clarity anddistancing techniques of Japanese theater undercut superficial naturalism, and comparison with sophisticated, graceful Chinese theater later relativized his own. In Chinese philosophy he encountered witty discrimination, an estranging critique of virtues, dialectical social interrelations, a stimulating flow of things, focus on practical engagement, warnings (apropos Confucius) of accommodation with power and, in his crucial Me-ti, what he intimated to Korsch as an “anti-systematic … epic science” realized through individual productivity, not by a top-down imposed social order. East Asian imagination stimulated an unconventional aesthetics. In ethics, the social paradox of self-love would avoid turning people into “the servants of priests.” Even another global politics once briefly seemed conceivable, when China appeared to confront European Stalinism, but in the end that revolution disappointed as well.