Abstract:

At the core of much twentieth-century aesthetic theory lies the suspicion that the efficacy of post-avantgarde artistic practice is neutralized by the structures of social control in which it has come to be imbricated. Epistemic Strategies in Twentieth-Century German Theatre: Brecht, Weiss, M?ller takes issue with this deep-seated assumption of modernist and postmodernist thought, with which discursive theory has implicitly arrogated to itself an epistemic privilege over the works of art that it regards as its objects. Re-assessing the legacy of Bertolt Brecht's theatrical method in twentieth-century German theatre, I argue for the persistent capacity of aesthetic production to investigate its own potential functions within or against the particular institutional and normative structures in which it is embedded.

Epistemic Strategies comprises five chapters. Chapter One offers an original theoretical account of the practice of theatre, based on a critical dialogue with recent work in analytical philosophy. This account, which integrates post-Austinian speech-act theory and Davidson's theory of action to focus attention on the corporeality of theatre, allows me to reassess Brecht's theatrical method in Chapter Two and its relation to the practices of the "historical avantgarde" in Chapter Three. Such a re-conceptualization is necessary, if Verfremdung is to be understood as an epistemic method that need depend for its functioning neither upon Brecht's belief in the scientificity of Marx's theory of history nor upon his confidence in the social efficacy of art. This conceptual independence of Brecht's epistemic project is what allowed theatre-practitioners in the second half of the century to take up recognizably Brechtian techniques, and to inflect or transform them to serve markedly different aesthetic strategies. Through a detailed analysis of the spatio-temporal structure of Weiss's Marat/Sade in Chapter Four and M?ller's Mauser in Chapter Five, I argue that these works rely upon the epistemic strategies found in Brecht's theoretical writings to construct their own (differing) reflections on the capacity of theatrical representations to examine the historical and conceptual conditions of their own production and reception.