Roswitha Mueller: Bertolt Brecht and the Theory of Media (1989)

Bertolt Brecht spent a career puncturing artistic illusion while casting a spell as an innovator that has continued since his death in 1956. Best known to theater goers for “The Threepenny Opera,” “Mother Courage and her Children,” “The Caucasian Chalk Circle” and other production, the great playwright was, in fact, a man of all media. He was interested in radio and the cinema as soon as they appeared in Europe and brought to them, as well as to the stage, a dramatic theory so radical and influential that it has come to be known by the adjective “Brechtian.”

Publisher University of Nebraska Press, Lincoln & London, 1989
Modern German Culture and Literature series
ISBN 0803231326, 9780803231320
149 pages

Reviews: Katie Trumpener, Susan Bennett (Theatre Research International).

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Akin Adesokan: Postcolonial Artists and Global Aesthetics (2011)

“What happens when social and political processes such as globalization shape cultural production? Drawing on a range of writers and filmmakers from Africa and elsewhere, Akin Adesokan explores the forces at work in the production and circulation of culture in a globalized world. He tackles problems such as artistic representation in the era of decolonization, the uneven development of aesthetics across the world, and the impact of location and commodity culture on genres, with a distinctive approach that exposes the global processes transforming cultural forms.”

Publisher Indiana University Press, 2011
African Expressive Cultures series
ISBN 0253356792, 9780253356796
230 pages

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Fredric Jameson: The Geopolitical Aesthetic: Cinema and Space in the World System (1992)

Taking contemporary films from the United States, Russia, Taiwan, France, and the Philippines, The Geopolitical Aesthetic offers a reading of some of the most interesting films of the last decade and a general account of filmic representation in the postmodern world. Fredric Jameson poses some essential questions: How does representation function in contemporary film? How does contemporary cinema represent an ever more complex and international social reality? Jameson’s sophisticated and theoretically informed readings stress the ways in which disparate films—for example, Godard’s Passion, Pakula’s All the President’s Men, Yang’s The Terrorizer, Tahimik’s The Perfumed Nightmare, Tarkovsky’s Andrei Roublev—confront similar problems of representation. The solutions vary widely but the drive remains the same—the desire to find adequate allegories for our social existence.

The Geopolitical Aesthetic, a refinement and development of the arguments put forward in Jameson’s seminal work The Political Unconscious, is crucial reading for everyone interested in both film analysis and cultural studies.

Publisher Indiana University Press, 1992
Perspectives Series
ISBN 0253330939, 9780253330932
220 pages

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