Le Plaisir de Brecht: Bertolt Brecht, Roland Barthes, and literary politics

Thesis

This thesis explores the reception of the German playwright, Bertolt Brecht, by the French critic and theorist, Roland Barthes. Whilst the importance of Barthes’s encounter with Brechtian theatre has often been described in secondary literature, the exact nature of this relation has not yet been considered in adequate detail. Seeking to address this lacuna, I read Barthes’s writing on Brecht as a generative process, ongoing and open-ended, that responded to changes in French intellectual culture and in global politics between the mid-1950s and the late-1970s. Offering new readings of Barthes’s most important essays on Brecht – including ‘Les Tâches de la critique brechtienne’ (1956), two photo essays on Mutter Courage from 1959 and 1960, and ‘Brecht et le discours’ (1975) – this thesis combines close textual analysis with a consideration of Brecht’s wider reception in France and his evolving status as a politically committed writer. To explore this process of cultural transfer, translation – in both its interlinguistic and more figurative senses – is used as a guiding motif. Turning away from overly generalised conceptions of Brechtian aesthetics, I examine the specific texts to which Barthes had access in French translation and argue that his writing on Brecht can best be understood as a series of critical translations which sought to bring different elements of Brecht’s theatre and theory to bear on new political contexts. Foregrounding translation in this way introduces a comparative dimension to the study and allows texts by both writers to be read in a new, and indeed defamiliarised, light. This thesis contributes to a re-evaluation of Brecht and Barthes and examines how ideas of literary politics and political pleasure can be thought through translation and reception.

Authors: Johnston-McCondach, L

• DOI: 10.5287/ora-wx4qvvr86
• Type of award: DPhil
• Level of award: Doctoral
• Awarding institution: University of Oxford
• Language: English
• Keywords: literary theory; theatre; Marxist aesthetics; literature and politics; Barthes; Brecht
• Subjects: Criticism; Comparative literature; Marxist criticism; Literature