Tuesday 7th February 2023, 5:15-6:30pm

Hovenden Room, All Souls College 

Violeta Garrido (University of Granada): ‘Conditions for a Materialist Aesthetics: Consciousness and Unconsciousness in the Althusserian Reading of Brecht’  

In The Political Unconscious, Fredric Jameson observes that the practice of “metacommentary”, that is, the re-evaluation of the interpretative methods overlaid on texts, illuminates the theoretical positions of the “commentators” themselves. In this paper, I will explore Althusser’s theorisation of ideology by studying his comments on Brechtian theatre, which he deeply admired. In particular, I will interrogate Althusser’s claim that Brecht’s theatre “produces a critique of the illusions of consciousness” in light of his thoughts on the mechanism of interpellation and the unconscious nature of ideological activity. 

Liam Johnston-McCondach (New College): Le Plaisir de Brecht: Roland Barthes and Literary Politics 

When the German dramatist Bertolt Brecht travelled to Paris in 1954 to direct his play Mother Courage, the production was heralded in some quarters as a ‘révolution brechtienne’ and dismissed elsewhere as the beginning of an ‘épidémie brechtienne’. In the years following the Mother Courage production, however, Brecht’s profound influence on French culture quickly became apparent. Brecht came to embody a strikingly modern form of literary engagement. His work not only attracted the attention of dramatists and practitioners of theatre but also provoked the interest of writers seeking to theorise and rethink the political possibilities of literature. Chief amongst the latter group was Roland Barthes who, through a series of influential reviews and essays, did much to shape the image of Brecht in France. In this paper, I will consider how the appearance of Brecht’s dramatic and theoretical work in French helped Barthes to respond to pressing political and literary concerns during the early stages of his career. With its pleasurable fusion of politics and aesthetics, Brecht’s writing provided a key reference point for Barthes’s experimentation with a variety of critical idioms and perspectives. Through an analysis of Barthes’s engagement with Brecht, I will also draw on broader processes of cultural exchange and developments in criticism during a period of national and international political upheaval.