Annual volume, this time featuring special sections on Brecht's dramatic
fragments and on comedy in post-Brechtian theater, along with a variety
of other contributions.
Published for the International Brecht Society, the Brecht Yearbook is
the central scholarly forum for discussion of Brecht's life and work and
of topics of particular interest to him, especially the politics of
literatureand of theater in a global context. It embraces a wide variety
of perspectives and approaches and, like Brecht himself, is committed to
the use value of literature, theater, and theory.
Volume 44 features the first publication of Günter Kunert's translation
of Edgar Lee Masters's poem "The Hill" with handwritten annotations by
Brecht. A special section, "Brecht's Dramatic Fragments," includes
essays on the unresolved tension between individual and collectivist
resistance in Fatzer, the fragmentary aesthetic of Fleischhacker, and
the first English translation and performance of the David fragments.
The next section, "Pure Joke: The Comedy of Theater since Brecht,"
features articles on the poetics of interruption in the epilogue to The
Good Person of Szechwan, Heiner Müller's Hamletmachine as theater of
affirmation, a reassessment of the harlequin and the chorus in
post-Brechtian performance, and the performative gestures of quotation
in contemporary reality-satire. The volume also includes essays on
capitalist guilt and debt in The Debts of Mister Julius Caesar, Heiner
Müller's "Keuneresque" interview strategies, the 1962 world premiere of
The Threepenny Opera in Yiddish, and Brecht's reception of Mao Tse-tung
in two of his poems. Contributors include Gerrit-Jan Berendse, André
Fischer, Phoebe von Held, Nicholas E. Johnson, Christian Kirchmeier,
Günter Kunert, Nikolaus Müller-Schöll, Stephan Pabst, Corina L.
Petrescu, David Shepherd, Katrin Trüstedt, Uwe Wirth, Burkhardt Wolf,
and Xue Song.
Editor Markus Wessendorf is aProfessor in the Department of Theatre and
Dance at the University of Hawai'i at Manoa in Honolulu.
