What is it about?
This is an outtake from Chapter 5 of Estrangement and the Somatics of Literature: Tolstoy, Shklovsky, Brecht (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008), dealing with Bertolt Brecht on Verfremdung in terms of performativity.
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Why is it important?
Most published discussions of Brecht's reading of Mei Lanfang's command performance of Beijing Opera in Moscow, in 1935, chide the German director for his misunderstanding of Chinese acting--his projection of European attitudes onto the Chinese theatrical traditions. This article reads Brecht's 1936 article on the Verfremdungseffekt in Chinese acting more carefully, showing that the performative situation is/was actually much more complex than such essentializations would suggest, and that Brecht was aware of the complexity but didn't know how to resolve it.
Perspectives
This is one of my favorite intellectual activities: finding a conundrum in someone's writing, a complexity that doesn't seem to make sense, which is "resolved" in simplistic ways by a translator or commentator--and then attempting to untangle the skein along radically contextual (here performative) lines.
Professor Douglas J. Robinson
Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shenzhen
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: The Spatiotemporal Dialectic of Estrangement, TDR/The Drama Review, December 2007, The MIT Press,
DOI: 10.1162/dram.2007.51.4.121.
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