Darko Suvin: To Brecht and Beyond: Soundings in Modern Dramaturgy (1984)

In this collection of nine essays written between 1967 and 1977, Darko Suvin discerns the shape of a post-Individualist drama which may be to our age what the theatre of Shakespeare and Ibsen was to theirs. Suvin establishes the principles of composition of a crucial group of modern plays.

He examines some major attempts and failures to replace Ibsen’s “Individualist” theatre with the “Collectivist” drama. Two particularly important and original contributions to the subject are Suvin’s chapters on the Happenings in the United States and on the Paris Commune Theatre Law. The book focuses on the work of Brecht, both because of the importance of his plays and because of what Professor Suvin sees as Brecht’s central position today in any cultural critique that refuses to despair.

Publisher Harvester, Sussex, 1984
ISBN 0855279753, 9780855279752
283 pages

PDF (140 MB, no OCR)
See also Suvin’s The Use-Value of Dying (1996)

Rab-Rab: Journal for Political and Formal Inquiries in Art, 2 (2015)

“The second issue of Rab-Rab is in two volumes, all together in 500 pages. The focus of the second issue is ‘noise against culture.’ The contributions deal with the formal theory of noise, politics of contradictions, the device of estrangement, materialist film, music and violence, Futurism, Russian avant-garde, improvisation, void, heterophonies, swearwords, communism, ideologies of marriage, class wars and electricity.

Departing from our programme based on the understanding of art practice as a confrontation between formal and political inquiries, our aim in this issue is to use noise as the name for this difficult, disturbing, loud and coercive exploration. In many cases the formal and political aspects of noise are two separate things: the former is seen as an issue of information or perception, whereas the latter is usually reduced to a metaphor of spontaneity. But if we change these parameters of discussing the noise from measurable coefficients of failed communication, or from elusive metaphors of contingencies, towards the conceptual references related to ideology and class struggles, then what is understood as noise turns into something else. It can become a valid concept of inquiry, refusing to be pinpointed to conventional academic banalities silly phenomenological artistic fantasies immersed in.”

Contributors to volume A: Dror Feiler, Mazen Kerbaj, Ozren Pupovac, Ben Watson, Michel Chevalier, Jean-Claude Moineau, Taneli Viitahuhta, Henrik Heinonen, Grégoire Rousseau, Bruno Besana, Ivana Momčilović, and François Nicolas.

Contributors to volume B: Darko Suvin, Anthony Iles, Grupa za Konceptualnu Politiku, Mattin, Jyrki Siukonen, Rahel Puffert, Martin Krenn, Jaakko Karhunen, Max Ryynänen, Antti Eskelinen – Eze, Gert Raeithel, Aeron Bergman, Alejandra Salinas, Milica Tomić, Christine Delphy, Peter Gidal, Giovanna Esposito-Yussif, Kari Yli-Annala and Sezgin Boynik.

Edited by Sezgin Boynik
Publisher Rab-Rab Press, Helsinki, Sep 2015
ISSN 2342-4885
278 & 278 pages

Publisher (Issue 2A)
Publisher (Issue 2B)

Issue 2A: PDF, PDF
Issue 2B: PDF, PDF