scholarly journals Hook to the Chin

2009 ◽  
Vol 46 (1) ◽  
pp. 70-78
Author(s):  
Lev Kreft
Keyword(s):  
Early Stage ◽  
Bertolt Brecht ◽  
Physical Culture ◽  
Anglo Saxon ◽  
European Continent ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Weimar Germany ◽  
Philosophy Of Sport ◽  
Power And Energy

Hook to the ChinWithin historical avant-garde movements from the beginning of the 20th century, a curious taste and fascination for boxing burst out, and developed later into the claim that art must become more similar to boxing, or to sport in general. This fascination with pugilism in the early stage of its popularity on the continent included such charismatic figures of the Parisian avant-garde as Arthur Cravan, who was Oscar Wilde's nephew, a pretty good boxer and an unpredictable organizer of proto-dada outrages and scandals.After WWI, the zenith of artists' and intellectuals' love for boxing was reached in Weimar Germany. One of the well known examples connecting boxing with art was Bertolt Brecht with his statement that we need more good sport in theatre. His and other German avant-garde artists' admiration for boxing included the German boxing star May Schmeling, who was, at least until he lost his defending championship match against Joe Louis, an icon of the Nazis as well. Quite contrary to some later approaches in philosophy of sport, which compared sport with an elite art institution, Brecht's fascination with boxing took its anti-elitist and anti-institutional capacities as an example for art's renewal.To examine why and how Brecht included boxing in his theatre and his theory of theatre, we have to take into account two pairs of phenomena: sport vs. physical culture, and avant-garde theatre vs. bourgeois drama. At the same time, it is important to notice that sport, as something of Anglo-Saxon origin, and especially boxing, which became popular on the European continent in its American version, were admired by Brecht and by other avant-garde artists for their masculine power and energy. The energy in theatre, however, was needed to disrupt its cheap fictionality and introduce dialectical imagination of Verfremdungseffect (V-effect, or distancing effect). This was "a hook to the chin" of institutionalized art and of collective disciplinary morality of German tradition.

Introduction

2019 ◽  
pp. 1-32
Author(s):  
Emma Cole
Keyword(s):  
Bertolt Brecht ◽  
Reception Studies ◽  
Antonin Artaud ◽  
Diverse Range ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
History Of ◽  
Heiner Müller

This introduction makes the case for postdramatic classical receptions to be included within reception studies scholarship. It contextualizes the overall study by providing an overview of the role of the classics within the development of postdramatic theatre and by charting the history of postdramatic classical receptions. The chapter offers an alternative to the standard teleological approach of documenting the history of postdramatic theatre, and instead suggests that the form arose from a diverse range of international theatrical experiments led by highly influential avant-garde practitioners, which gained enough notoriety and exposure to influence a range of other theatre makers. It examines Antonin Artaud, Bertolt Brecht, Richard Schechner, Tadashi Suzuki, and Heiner Müller, alongside a range of broader contextual environments, to argue that an interest in the classical underpinned the development of postdramatic theatre.

Paul Dessau and the Hard Work of Socialist Music in the German Democratic Republic

2019 ◽  
Vol 16 (1) ◽  
pp. 51-66
Author(s):  
MARTIN BRADY
Keyword(s):  
German Democratic Republic ◽  
Choral Music ◽  
Democratic Republic ◽  
Bertolt Brecht ◽  
Hard Work ◽  
New Music ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Heiner Müller

AbstractThis article examines the labour of socialist music in the German Democratic Republic, focusing on composer Paul Dessau's use of political cryptography and quotation in a number of compositions from the opera The Condemnation of Lukullus (1950) through to Choral Music No. 5 (1976). Most famous for his collaborations with Bertolt Brecht, Dessau was the leading avant-garde composer of the GDR and its chief practitioner of serialism. He believed that only difficult, progressive New Music could convey the struggle(s) of socialism. This brought him into conflict with the authorities, who accused him of formalism. Choral Music No. 5 is a setting of a poem by Heiner Müller based on a speech by Erich Honecker (Žižek refers to the text as an ‘obscenity’). Dessau's composition is complex and dialectical, abrasive in its rhythms and counterpoint, and pluralistic in style. It is the embodiment of Dessau's belief in socialist music as rewarding hard work.

The Early Reception of Karl Barth's Theology in Britain: A Supplementary View

2001 ◽  
Vol 54 (4) ◽  
pp. 504-527
Author(s):  
D. Densil Morgan
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Early Stage ◽  
The United States ◽  
Church History ◽  
Karl Barth ◽  
Theological Method ◽  
Anglo Saxon ◽  
English Speaking ◽  
To Come ◽  
English Speaking World

One of the axioms of modern church history in Britain is that whereas Anglo-Saxon thought was on the whole impervious to the appeal and achievement of Karl Barth, it was among the Scots alone that the Swiss theologian's theories found any real resonance and creative response. Stephen Sykes in a 1979 volume of studies in Barth's theological method, mentions the somewhat bewildered response to his publications in Britain and the United States between 1925 and the mid-1980s and goes on to say that ‘from now onwards it is in Scotland that Barth is taken with the greatest seriousness in the English speaking world’. In a later volume of centenary essays, R. H. Roberts traced the reception of the theology of Karl Barth ‘in the Anglo-Saxon world’ by quoting the evidence of such late 1920s and early 1930s figures as J. H. Morrison, John McConnachie, H. R. Mackintosh, Norman Porteous and A. J. MacDonald to claim that ‘it is clear from an early stage that enthusiasm for Barth's work … was primarily a Scottish attribute’. In another essay in the same volume, Colin Gunton contrasted the usual English attitude to Barth with that of theologians from other lands: ‘For the most part and despite exceptions’, he claimed, ‘the English find it difficult to come to terms with the theology of Karl Barth’, while in a companion volume Geoffrey Bromiley noted that this was hardly the case for theologians and pastors ‘in such diverse lands as Switzerland, Germany, France, Holland, Hungary, and Scotland’. Again and again, it is Scotland which is emphasised as being the place within the British Isles where Barth's ideals took root.

Pariah Modernism

2020 ◽  
pp. 87-122
Author(s):  
Amy Feinstein
Keyword(s):  
The Novel ◽  
Anglo Saxon ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Character Study ◽  
Ethical Authorship ◽  
Modern Era ◽  
Final Text ◽  
Indefinite Pronouns ◽  
Character Types

Chapter 4 considers the solely-metaphorical presence of Jews in the final text of The Making of Americans. Paralleling the evolution found in Stein’s notebooks, the novel’s narrator largely abandons storytelling in lieu of character study. Stein replaces the Jewish and Anglo-Saxon character types from the notebooks with a purely behavioral nomenclature and, as a result, the published volume contains no explicit references to Jews. The narrator nonetheless maintains a focus on a categorically Jewish and modern type: the pariah. He introduces several pariah figures, from servant girls and parvenus to avant-garde writers, who join him in a fraternity of what he calls “Brother Singulars.” With an eye to Hannah Arendt’s notion of the modern Jewish visionary or “conscious pariah,” the chapter argues that Stein’s narrator, with the characterological “plot” he is writing for himself and strangers, estranges narration by increasingly abstracting his characterology with indefinite pronouns as the novel progresses. Amidst the formal experimentation of ever-increasing repetition and abstraction, the narrator’s Jewish pariahs recede into textual indistinguishability while still differentiating themselves from others. Through this association, Stein sets the agenda for ethical authorship in the modern era.

Transnational planning

2021 ◽  
pp. 85-108
Author(s):  
Jens Steffek
Keyword(s):  
Raw Materials ◽  
German Economy ◽  
Public Works ◽  
European Continent ◽  
North West ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
The North ◽  
International Theory ◽  
The One ◽  
Global Economic Governance

This chapter is dedicated to non-liberal varieties of technocratic internationalism. The focus is on two largely forgotten authors who represent technocratic internationalism in the fascist and socialist context. I first consider the international theory of Giuseppe De Michelis, a Geneva-based Italian diplomat who developed a fascist approach to international cooperation. What he proposed in the early 1930s was a system of global economic governance coordinated by a powerful international organization. Projecting Italian corporativism to the international level, De Michelis envisaged a global scheme to allocate capital, labour, and raw materials, with a united ‘Eurafrica’ as avant-garde. The second part of the chapter considers the work of Francis Delaisi, a French political economist and journalist of the same generation. Delaisi was a syndicalist who late in his life came to sympathize with the way the Nazis re-organized the German economy. He was the author of the so-called ‘Delaisi plan’, a scheme of transnational public works intended to unite the European continent. The idea behind this plan, presented in 1931, was to bring together the ‘two Europes’ that he found to co-exist on the same continent: the industrial core in the North-West on the one hand and the far less developed areas in Eastern and Southern Europe on the other.

The Losey–Moscow Connection: Experimental Soviet Theatre and the Living Newspaper

2014 ◽  
Vol 30 (3) ◽  
pp. 249-268 ◽  
Author(s):  
Colin Gardner
Keyword(s):  
Bertolt Brecht ◽  
Federal Theatre Project ◽  
Political Theatre ◽  
Santa Barbara ◽  
Hollywood Film ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Critical Studies ◽  
Epic Theatre ◽  
Federal Theatre ◽  
The University

Although Joseph Losey is best known as the blacklisted director of films such as the Pinter-scripted The Servant, The Go-Between, and Accident, as well as Mr Klein starring Alain Delon, he also had an important career in leftist theatre prior to making his Hollywood film debut in in the late 1940s. Because of his collaboration with Bertolt Brecht on the 1947 Hollywood production of Galileo, it is assumed that Losey learned from him most of his stagecraft – particularly the use of Verfremdungseffekt and self-reflexivity. However, as this article shows, Losey's apprenticeship was rooted not in the Epic Theatre (which was largely a second-hand phenomenon) but in the Soviet theatrical avant garde, observed at first hand during a 1935 Moscow visit studying the techniques of Meyerhold, Vakhtangov, and Pavlovich Okhlopkov, whose ‘theatre in the round’ stagings and use of complex ramps and projections provided the basis for Losey's subsequent Federal Theatre Project ‘Living Newspaper’ productions – notably Triple-A Plowed Under and Injunction Granted! Under the aegis of co-founder Hallie Flanagan, the Living Newspaper proved to be the model of 1930s political theatre: topical, didactic, fast-paced – and almost immediately obsolete as events superseded the plays' relevance. Colin Gardner is Professor of Critical Theory and Integrative Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He is the author of critical studies on Joseph Losey and Karel Reisz for Manchester University Press's ‘British Film Makers’ series and of Beckett, Deleuze, and the Televisual Event: Peephole Art for Palgrave Macmillan. He is currently working with Felicity Colman on a three-volume Encyclopedia of Film-Philosophy.

Axiological aspects of movement activity

2016 ◽  
Vol 19 (19) ◽  
pp. 6-10
Author(s):  
Halina Zdebska-Biziewska
Keyword(s):  
Physical Activity ◽  
Physical Education ◽  
Secondary School ◽  
Basic Research ◽  
Professional Sport ◽  
Physical Culture ◽  
Movement Activity ◽  
Health Values ◽  
Philosophy Of Sport ◽  
Promotion Of Physical Activity

The physical culture (named commonly sport) constitutes a domain of many heterogeneous values. The health values play one of the most important role among them. They are especially exposed to all their spheres like physical education, recreation, professional sport, physiotherapy. The health values constitute the strongest argument in promotion of physical activity. Is it really suffi cient reason for intensifi cation of youth’s self-activity or it should rather be more effective to reach ludic and hedonistic values as a better working tool for movement promotion? The aim of this paper is an answer to the question based on synthetic axiological analysis of movement activity. The author analysed chosen Polish publicationsin the field of philosophy and philosophy of sport confronted with opinions of students from the secondary school on attractiveness of physical education lessons. The axiological method has been used in this study. The basic research technique was the analysis of content.

scholarly journals To Brecht and Back. Notes on Clement Greenberg’s Avant-Garde and Kitsch

2021 ◽  
Vol 14 (1) ◽  
pp. 153-163
Author(s):  
Camilla Froio
Keyword(s):  
Bertolt Brecht ◽  
Soviet Society ◽  
Editorial Process ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Trace Back ◽  
International Reputation ◽  
Dwight Macdonald ◽  
Partisan Review

Clement Greenberg’s international reputation is partly due to the success of one of his first and most perceptive essays, Avant-Garde and Kitsch, published in the Fall 1939 issue of “Partisan Review”. Despite its unsurpassed importance, the article still requires a broader comprehension of its origins: according to Greenberg’s personal papers, the essay’s main concepts began to take form during the Winter 1939, when the author was involved in the drafting of a new essay on Bertolt Brecht, still unpublished today, at that time submitted to the “Partisan Review”’s editorial board but rejected. A second document enables to trace back Avant-Garde and Kitsch’s roots even further: according to a letter by Greenberg, one of the editors, Dwight Macdonald, plagiarized the rejected script as his last essay, Soviet Society and Its Cinema, clearly seemed to prove. The varied topics articulated in the letter, as well as in the draft on Brecht, would be at the basis of Avant-Garde and Kitsch, becoming crucial and early components of the editorial process of the well-known essay. 

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