Alienation Effects Research Articles

فلسفةُ الرفضِ وأبعادُها الدَّلاليَّةُ في شعرِ فوزي كريم

يُعدُّ فوزي كريم شاعِرًا وكاتبًا ورسَّامًا من الجيل الستينيِّ، غادرَ العراق مرتينِ، كانتِ الثانية إلى منفاهُ الأخير، لندن، صدرتْ مجموعتهُ الشعرية عن دارِ المدى، وبعدَ اِستقرائها، وجدتُ فيها تكرُّرًا لرفضهِ واقعَ وطنهِ تغييبًا لذاتِ الإنسانِ ومُكوِّنهِ الوجوديِّ، لذا آثرَ الهجرةَ، التي لَمْ تكن أقلَّ وطأةً من موطنهِ، إذْ الضياعُ الذَّاتي، والنفس المُتآكِلَةُ شوقًا إلى الأهلِ والأصدقاءِ وأماكنِ الصبا والشباب.
 وددْتُ تقسيم البحثِ على أساليبَ الرفضِ والألفاظِ، إلاَّ أنَّ التمازُج بين الاثنينِ دفعني إلى اختيارِ مسلكِ الدَّلالةِ، مقسمةً إيَّاها على : رفضِ واقع الوطن ، ورفضِ واقع الغربة .

Structural adjustment, alienation, and mass protest

The International Monetary Fund (IMF) is (in)famous for its structural adjustment programs, which provide fresh credit for borrowing governments in exchange for market-liberalizing policy reforms. While studies have documented a causal relationship between structural adjustment and political instability, scholarly understanding of the mechanisms underlying this relationship remain perfunctory. The received wisdom is that IMF policy conditions generate material hardship which then drives political instability. We advance an additional pathway—that instability is also prompted by alienation effects related to the foreign imposition of policies. Drawing on a sample of up to 168 countries between 1980 and 2014, we test for the presence of both mechanisms. Our results suggest that there are alienation effects, indicated by a persistent protest-inducing impact of IMF program participation when controlling for market-liberalizing conditions, and especially when programs are concluded by left-wing governments and non-repeat borrowers. We also find evidence of hardship effects, indicated by a positive relationship between the intensity of fiscal austerity required and the number of protests. Our findings have important implications for the relationship between structural adjustment, contentious politics, and the role of international organizations in domestic policy reform.

Tell Me Lies (Peter Brook, 1968) or How I Learned to Start Worrying about Vietnam

The Vietnam War has been dubbed the world’s first “television war”. No war had been broadcast as widely before, leading to numerous documentaries both during and after the war. Moreover, no war has triggered as much protest from civilians around the world, which also generated a number of films that documented these protest movements. At first sight Tell Me Lies may seem one of them, documenting some of the counterculture movement in the UK at the end of the 1960s. However the film is quite unique in both subject and formal approach. As its subtitle “A film about London” indicates, the film is not so much about Vietnam as about the impact that news and images of a war can have on the lives of ordinary people in a country far removed yet indirectly involved in the conflict. The film’s originality also lies in its kaleidoscopic aesthetics, blending documentary techniques with fiction, the immediacy of newsreels and pieces to camera with musical interludes, staged performances, Brechtian “alienation effects” and self-reflexive comments. Interestingly the film was based on Peter Brook’s own play US (1966), which caused quite a stir among the audience. However, Brook did not want to just ‘adapt’ his play for the screen but wanted to find purely cinematographic devices to achieve the same effect, which he defined as “confrontation”. This paper aims to analyse how Tell Me Lies not only provides a challenging reflection about the power of art and film in particular to represent the horrors of war, but also questions how to mediate the emotional impact that these representations can have.

Contributors

Contributors

Counter/Public

The objective of this research-creation exhibition is to demonstrate a theory/praxis research method developed for documentary filmmaker-scholars. The session will demonstrate a method developed while researching my dissertation “Counter/Public: The Politics of Committed Film in the Philippines.” The research focuses on the Philippine “new cinema” (the 1970s-1980s) and follows two articulations—academic writing surveying primary and secondary texts in the field and a parallel interactive documentary and “social history.” The latter consists of conversations with twenty-five cultural producers and political participants (archivists, journalists, actors, editors, filmmakers, and activists) active during Philippine “democratization.” Said conversations thoroughly explore the subject’s involvement, motivations, and ideas and were carefully lit and filmed with two cameras. I began experimenting with different ways of putting the video footage into tension with the past. In so doing drew upon several theories. One was Allan Sekula’s argument for combining a materialist cultural history with montage. Another was Steve Anderson’s notion of database histories—an alternative to digital historiographies that, instead of historicizing the past, use database and search engine to construct a more flexible, reflexive, and participatory digital archive. A third was borrowed from Sharon Daniel, who envisions interface design as “argument” and user interaction and navigation as “inquiry.” Through an almost iconoclastic approach (in lieu of performative alienation effects), Daniel’s practice attempts to challenge the viewer’s assumptions about narrative construction while foregrounding contradictions between politics and aesthetics. The result—an interactive database documentary—combines documentary and qualitative research methods. As with many documentaries, I was dependent upon collaboration and ideas proposed by the subject while questioning the subject’s truth claims, aesthetic construction, etc. In terms of the interface design, I chose images of archives, vinegar-syndrome afflicted film, and distressed video as metaphors to represent reification and memory loss. I broke down the interview material into roughly one-minute edits consisting of tightly intercut, differing, and even contradictory recollections of two interviewees. The “script” for these edits was “written” using qualitative analysis software (f4analyse)—revealing patterns and topics that might not otherwise have surfaced. The viewer can access said edits in the interactive documentary (made in Klynt) by clicking on either COUNTER/PUBLIC or COMMITTED/FILM. The long-form interviews are available from a drop-down menu linked to a YouTube channel. The idea is not only to preserve the excess footage but publish the informant interviews (here, as “social history” integrated into and standing alongside an interactive documentary) for viewers who either reconstruct the research process themselves or—if they prefer—perform their own research. Bibliography Anderson, Steve. Technologies of History: Visual Media and the Eccentricity of the Past. Hanover, New Hampshire: Dartmouth University Press, 2011. Daniel, Sharon. "On Politics and Aesthetics," in Studies in Documentary Film: iDocs special edition, Volume 6, issue 2, edited by Judith Aston, Jonathan Dovey and Sandra Gaudenzi (Bristol: Intellectual Journals, 2012) 215-227. ______. Public Secrets. Interactive web documentary. Vectors Journal, Issue 4, 2008. http://vectors.usc.edu/issues/4/publicsecrets/ ______. Blood Sugar. 2006, interactive web documentary. In Vectors Journal, Issue 6, 2010. http://vectorsjournal.org/issues/6/bloodsugar/ Sekula, Allan. "Reading an Archive: Photography Between Labour and Capital." In The Photography Reader, edited by Liz Wells, 443-452. New York: Routledge, 2003.

‘Coi libri o col mondo?’

‘With books or with the world?’
 Alienation effects without disorientation in Viaggio e maravigliose avventure d’un veneziano by Francesco Contarini
 This paper investigates the forms and effects of displacement in Viaggio e maravigliose avventure d’un veneziano ch’esce per la prima volta dalle lagune e si reca a Padova e a Milano, published anonymously in Milan in 1818. According to Luigi Catucci, the author is Francesco Contarini, who translated many travel books for the editor Sonzogno between 1816 and 1817: this would explain the noticeable intertextual dialogue between the Viaggio and other travel writings, both fictional and non-fictional. Some allusions to Vasco de Gama’s and James Cook’s geographical explorations reveal the author’s interest in travel as an anthropological experience, while quotations from Swift and De Maistre suggest a familiarity with the literary conventions and the most recent renewal of the European novel. 
 From a theoretical point of view, the essay examines the interaction between travel literature, (anti-)novel, récit excentrique, and parody, in order to show that literary contamination works as an estrangement device. At the same time, this theoretical interpretation is evaluated (from an analytical and interpretative point of view) in relation to the narrative techniques through which Contarini expresses the alienation-effect of the first-person dramatized narrator, prompting a strong sense of disorientation in the reader (but not in the main character).

Brechtian AlienAsian: Socialist ex Machina from Brecht's The Good Woman of Setzuan and David Hare's Fanshen

Brechtian AlienAsian:Socialist ex Machina from Brecht's The Good Woman of Setzuan and David Hare's Fanshen Sheng-mei Ma (bio) Anchored in working-class culture and socialist belief, the German playwright Bertolt Brecht theorizes Alienation-effect to advocate performers' and spectators' emotional dissociation from the stage in favor of thinking through, to borrow the title of Timothy J. Wiles's 1980 book, "the theater event."1 The A-effect intends to overhaul the modern stage for a non-Aristotelian, non-Stanislavsky alternative, partly inspired by a Peking Opera female impersonator Mei Lanfang, whose performances, for lack of a better word, "wowed" him in Moscow in 1935. Considering the political implications of the visit, John Fuegi asserts that Brecht was invited to Moscow with the express order "to be extremely explicit in opposing the Nazis in his own writings."2 But party affiliation aside, the theory of A-effect served to legitimize the dramatist's own sense of dis-orientation by "Oriental" theatrical stylization. That which is taken for granted within traditional Chinese dramaturgy so shocks Brecht that he finds the model for his vision of epic theater.3 The white love for the inexplicable, mystical Orient means to love it to death, to read into the riddle of a "Chinese box" the West's own wish fulfillment. The West's enlightenment comes at the expense of occluding the East. Not to mince words, Brecht births epic theater over the dead body of Chinese theater, a collage of fragmentary impressions rather than an evolving, organic heritage. And Brecht's self-centered, left-leaning Orientalism is inherited by the socialist David Hare in his early agitprop and populist plays. Critiquing Brecht's theory and practice of Alienation-effect, this exploration focuses on his seminal [End Page 443] essay "Alienation Effects in Chinese Acting" (1936), his play The Good Woman of Setzuan (1947, henceforth Setzuan), and Hare's copycat or "copychinese" Fanshen (1976). Alienation, by definition, involves a split, and for Brecht, alienation in drama entailed a departure from Aristotelian-Stanislavskian conventions. Such division is constitutive of Marxism, which posits dialectical forces vying for dominance throughout human history. Contestation of opposites within oneself and one's world recurs in Brecht's dramas. But even the word "alienation" casts its own shadow. Effecting Brecht's Alienation required an alien nation—a phantom one at that—to prop up the white state of being. The operative word may well be spelled with its uncanny sound-alikes: AlieNation, even AlienAsian. These two neologisms—an "alien nation" comprised of "alien Asians"—dwell holographically within "alienation." The long shadow cast all the way to the other side of the earth bespeaks Brecht and Hare's quixotic quest beyond the capitalist West, chancing upon a solution in socialist ex machina. The Oriental Other provides an "out" from their Western selfhood, an escape clause from the contractual bond(age) to the West by virtue of birth and cultural upbringing. The socialist China peoples their stage, as though crowding off the Western tradition. This replacement hearkens back, ironically, to Greek tragedies' deus ex machina, yet another Western legacy against which the playwrights presumably rebel. In Aeschylus' or Euripides' tragedies, deus ex machina or God from the machine, i.e., lowered with ropes or on a crane, or emerged on a riser through a trapdoor, rounds off the play with a divine, even cathartic, closure. In Brecht and Hare, the socialist China does not descend only when the curtain drops—it constitutes the whole play. Yet these early plays featuring socialist ex machina and Brechtian AlienAsian are but a mere "yellow" touch ("stain," some critics argue) on their largely white corpus. Whether a people's awakening to self-sufficiency in Brecht's Setzuan or Hare's communist apologia in the West's counterculture movement, this socialist ex machina is fully enacted in these early plays to intimate an Oriental utopia in the making vis-a-vis the capitalist West. Nevertheless, such dabbling in the East occupies but a miniscule portion of their corpuses, exposing the whim of young idealistic artists coming of age, a momentary flirt with the unknown beyond the West, before they [End Page 444] settle in for...

Political Education of College Students in the New Media Ambient

With the development of quality education in China, the area of quality education is more and more extensive. Therefore, higher vocational colleges, as the cradle of talent training, have also been highly valued. Now, the political education of college students is facing a severe situation, which has a subtle impact on the employment and future career development of students. The specious information in the new media ambient has a far reaching impact on people's value judgment and value choice, leading to the distortion of people's values and alienation of behavior. With the emergence of new media, college students have become main audience of new media, and the new media ambient has constantly affected the cognitive and behavioral style of higher vocational college students, resulting in the cognitive distortion, thinking first, Behavior Alienation and other adverse effects of higher vocational students, this has seriously hindered the olitical education of higher vocational students. The political education of college students will directly affect the development of our talent strategy. Therefore, this paper discusses the political education in the new media ambient, from creating a positive network culture ambient in the new media ambient, and actively establishing a new media platform on campus to strengthen its effectiveness, so as to provide guidance and reference for the old teachers of political education and related education practitioners.

Confronting Otherness through Theatre: On Directing The Merchant of Venice for Thai Audiences

Abstract This article analyzes on a new directorial approach to Venice Vanija (เวนิสวาณิช), a Thai version of William Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice (written 1596–99) and translated by King Rama vi (r. 1910–1925). It aimed to create a new space and new rules that would encourage Thai audiences to embrace new perspectives by watching the performance. The production was directed by the author in 2018 in the Department of Dramatic Arts in the Faculty of Arts at Chulalongkorn University. The directing approach focused on the play’s famous line “all that glitters is not gold;” (Act ii, scene vii, line 65), and stressed how struggles between majorities and “the Other” are connected to identity conflicts that contrast with tensions with other people and conflicts within the whole community. The above focus was elaborated by using alienation effects, including a grotesque modern fairytale-like look, a nearly all-female cast, a distinctive traverse stage and set design, effeminate costumes for male characters portrayed by actresses, and mixed acting techniques. The director achieved his goals by concentrating on the message and the main conflicts in the play, transforming “aliens into the allies” through using good surprises and friendly attacks, and respecting every party.

Yeats’s Doll and Donkey: Alienating theUpanishadsinThe Herne’s Egg

The Herne’s Egg, like Yeats’s other late plays, is a great challenge for readers. In addition to putting forward an esoteric philosophy that evades coherent interpretation, the play is deliberately anti-heroic, grotesque, and sexually offensive. Yeats’s remark that the play is Purohit Swami’s “philosophy in a fable” has guided critics toward the Upanishads for clues. This essay questions longstanding assumptions about the Indian influence on the play, examining Yeats’s appropriation of the Upanishadic concept of the Self for his own vision of Unity of Being. Interpretations of the play that foreground the influence of the Sanskrit texts on Yeats’s dramaturgy often overlook the play’s form and genre. This essay aims to shed new light on the play by drawing attention to its style, which fuses several modernist aesthetics in a form of experimental farce. I argue that gaiety is Yeats’s way of dealing with the futility resulting from his determinist view of the universe. Yeats’s farcical style creates quasi-Brechtian alienation effects in The Herne’s Egg, sublimating existential dread to tragic joy.

Shakesplish: How We Read Shakespeare’s Language by Paula Blank

Reviewed by: Shakesplish: How We Read Shakespeare’s Language by Paula Blank Eric Thibodeaux-Thompson Shakesplish: How We Read Shakespeare’s Language. By Paula Blank. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2018. Pp. xii + 213. $80.00, cloth. Paula Blank’s work is timely, and she is dearly missed by many colleagues, friends, and family members. In fact, after Professor Blank’s passing in 2016, so many people were moved by her work that the author’s manuscript was shaped into this 2018 publication. In the spirit of “Spanglish,” Paula Blank coined the term “Shakesplish” to account for the way we may occasionally experience Shakespeare’s language as a hybrid English. As modern English readers, speakers, and listeners, at first we invariably understand some, but not all, of Shakespeare’s Early Modern English. Blank informs us that there can be great value in what we don’t understand, or as she puts it, “We might discover that ‘Shakesplish’ may be composed of errors in comprehension, but that such errors enable, rather than hinder, some of the pleasures we take in Shakespeare’s language today” (xii). Blank’s book is arranged in chapters according to how we often perceive Shakespeare’s language—as “Beautiful,” “Sexy,” “Funny,” and “Smart” and book-ended with “Shakespeare in Modern English” at the beginning and “Shakespeare as Modern English” at the end. Blank’s book is full of exhaustive, pains-taking, and impressive examinations of what words and expressions meant in Shakespeare’s time compared to the words and expressions that are closest to those in today’s world. Yet amid Blank’s formidable research on two areas of conflict—Early Modern English words compared to our Modern English words and what characters are saying compared to what we think they’re saying—are acknowledgments that traditional scholars and practitioners can all get behind. In her first chapter regarding “Shakespeare in Modern English,” Blank writes, “Speaking Shakespeare leads us to the sources of our own power because we find a language which expresses the depth of our experience more fully, more richly, more completely than our own words can” (11–12). The author makes clear in her second chapter, “Beautiful,” that as we appreciate the occasional difference between what Shakespeare’s characters are saying and what we think they’re saying, we get a deeper understanding of how we experience Shakespeare’s language. Shakesplish is what we think Hamlet is considering, why we think Falstaff is funny, and how we admire Henry V to some extent. Shakesplish involves what we bring to Shakespeare as much as what Shakespeare brings to us. Rather than being preoccupied with what’s “right” [End Page 268] and “wrong” in someone’s understanding of a scene, the author encourages us to embrace what seems to be happening in a scene or within a Shakespearean character, as well. Of course, we need to be accurate about what’s taking place in a scene, but by not dismissing all of the interpretive errors, we can better prepare our productions of Shakespeare. Blank explains: “My focus, here, will be on English that has become strange over time. Shakespeare’s ‘alienation effects,’ moreover, sometimes draw us closer to the plays, rather than distancing us from them, even when we aren’t entirely sure we get what his characters are saying. As Nehamas writes, ‘The art we love is art we don’t yet fully understand. . . . Beauty always remains a bit of a mystery . . . more like something calling me without showing exactly what it is calling me to.’ Shakespeare’s unusual language can produce, in an important turn of phrase by scholar Ruth Morse, ‘alienation effects which do not alienate.’ It somehow invites us in” (33). In chapter 3, “Sexy,” Blank reminds us that the word “sexy” didn’t come into use until the end of the nineteenth century (93). Nevertheless, modern audiences enjoy any hint of sex in the plays, which often takes the form of characters expressing their desire for sex more than the act itself (93). With “Funny,” Blank’s fourth chapter, the reader will again, no doubt, smile and nod in agreement with the author’s assertion that we sometimes react before we...

Branislav Jakovljević: Alienation Effects. Performance and Self-Management in Yugoslavia, 1945–91. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 2016. 382 pp.

Branislav Jakovljević: Alienation Effects. Performance and Self-Management in Yugoslavia, 1945–91. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 2016. 382 pp.

Alienation Effects: Performance and Self-Management in Yugoslavia, 1945–1991

Alienation Effects: Performance and Self-Management in Yugoslavia, 1945–1991

Branislav Jakovljević, Alienation Effects: Performance and Self-Management in Yugoslavia, 1945–91

Alienation Effects is a rich and versatile, compellingly written volume bringing together insights from history, politics, economics, performance, art, and philosophy. The book will be useful for both undergraduate and postgraduate students interested in the interplay between conceptual art and politics, and for scholars dealing with both performance and Balkan studies.

Cooperating or competing in three languages: cultural accommodation or alienation?

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to study the effect of using foreign languages on cooperative behavior in a prisoner’s dilemma setting. The cultural accommodation hypothesis suggests that people are less cooperative in English, associated with the Anglophone cultural cluster, than in French, which is – as is Belgium – associated with the more cooperative Latin European cultural cluster.Design/methodology/approachChoices are framed as pricing strategies in the context of duopolistic competition. In total, 422 Flemish-Belgium participants with English and French as foreign and Dutch as their native language played in one of three language treatments.FindingsWhile the authors observe differences between the native and both foreign languages, which are moderated by gender, the authors do not find any difference in effects between the two foreign languages that are associated with different cultures. Extending cultural accommodation arguments, the data suggests an effect specific to the use of the two selected foreign languages.Originality/valueThe authors contribute to this literature by reporting an experimental test of cultural accommodation and alienation effects related to two foreign languages. The authors explore novel arguments, related to cognitive psychology and gender effects.

New Brechtian Impulses in Contemporary Finnish Theatre: A Case Study of Juha Jokela’s Esitystalous (2010)

At the beginning of the 21st century, Finnish theatre experienced a wave of new, politically engaged drama that came hand in hand with a renewal of aesthetics and dramaturgical strategies. One component of this renewal was a new perspective on Brecht’s epic theatre, which was initiated by visits of Finnish theatre directors to theatre performances, for example, by Frank Castorf, in Germany. As a consequence of this, an interweavement of Brechtian aesthetics and Finnish theatre tradition became a trend on Finnish stages. One example of this is Juha Jokela’s Esitystalous (Performance Economy), which was premiered at Espoon Kaupunginteatteri in 2010. Here, Jokela uses Brechtian alienation effects to put the audience in the position of a critical observer. However, he does not dissolve the unity of actor and role, but sticks to the Finnish acting tradition, thereby creating his very own aesthetics of a new political theatre.

󰡔유머 벗기기󰡕에 시도된 벤 존슨의 풍자극적 실험

Every Man out of His Humour is Jonson’s dramaturgical experiment capitalizing on virulent popularity of satiric literature in the late 1590s. The play does not develop in a conventional plot-line of rising and falling action to which the audience is accustomed through Shakespeare’s romantic comedies. Instead, it concatenates a series of isolated episodes which are given a formal framework by the chorus. With various techniques of Brechtian alienation effects, Jonson invites the audience to adopt an analytical attitude towards his characters rather than emotional engagement with them. In doing so, Jonson’s characterization indicates an interest not so much in the inner lives of individuals but in the public interaction in social groups, and his experiment is primarily concerned with role-playing or play-acting. Through a sequence of role-playing, fools and gulls are stripped of their affected humours which include Puntarvolo’s make-believe chivalric interludes with his wife, Fustidious’s and Fungoso’s ludicrous fashion-mongering, Sogliardo’s crass social climbing, Shift’s preposterous huckstering, Deliro’s pathetic uxoriousness, Fallace’s lascivious snobbery, Saviolina’s spurious air of conceitedness, Carlo’s unrestrained scurrilous jokes, and Macilente’s lance of corrosive envy. Indeed, the audience might find it difficult to enjoy Jonson’s avowedly unconventional experiment. Whether an experimental success or failure, however, Every Man out of His Humour should be regarded as a milestone in the development of Elizabethan theatre. With the play, Jonson established himself not only as a leading satirist of the time but also as a major influence, artistic and intellectual, on the direction that comedy city comedy in particular was to take in the following decades.

Brecht'sGuter Menschin Sichuan: Recontextualizing China

IntroductionBertolt Brecht's fascination with China and the Far East is evident from the Chinese scrolls and Japanese Noh masks that hung from his walls; the plots of plays and novels including Die Massnahme, Der kaukasische Kreidekreis, and Me-ti, Das BuchderWendungen;his freely translated Chinesepoems; and histheoreticalessays onepic theater,particularly, inderchinesischenSchauspielkunst.However, it is oftendifficult to see beyond the surface manifestations of such interests. Brecht, who took notes on Chinese philosophy and wrote approvingly aboutChinesepoetry,nevertriedto justifyor explain his own relationshipto China or (Hayot 54). Nor does there exist a metadiscourse on China with which to begin to think about not only Brecht's to China, but his own understanding of that relation (Hayot 55). Critics such as Marcel Reich-Ranicki, Martin Esslin, and John Fuegi have been cited for dismissing Brecht's fascination with China as either superficial or as a form of exoticism.1 Conversely, critics such as Renata Berg-Pan and Yuan Tan have attempted to establish the importance of Chinese poetry and philosophy to Brecht's worldview by examining specific examples of overlap between them. Although oppositional in nature, these critical perspectives nevertheless elucidate Brecht's relationship to China in a similar manner: both camps assign fixed positions to China and Chinese culture in to Brecht's personal and professional work.In contrast, I propose in this article that Brecht's engagement with China is far more variable, and that Brecht's worldview; his construct of China; and its referent, the historical, geopolitical entity of China, are not only closely linked, but also in constant flux. The depiction of China in texts such as Der gute Mensch von Sezuan suggests that Brecht's relationship to China is more nuanced and complex than has often been perceived. Brecht's utilization of Chinese markers and motifs in Dergute Menschandotherworksspeakstotheimportanceofforeigninfluence inthedevelopment and formation of new cultural, political, and historical perspectives. Focusing on the dynamics of cultural exchange, I situate Brecht and German literature in a broader globalcontext,andapproach hisoeuvre from multiple angles to examine cross-cultural mixtures across national discourses that were once considered separate and discrete.The Development of Der gute Mensch von SezuanAn oft-cited example of Chinese influence upon Brecht's thinking and worldview is Brecht's essay on Verfremdungseffekte from 1936.2 In this theoretical work, Brecht discusses how Chinese acting methods produce the Verfremdungseffekt, or alienation effect. According to Brecht, the alienation effect forces the audience to consciously accept or reject the actors' actions and utterances. In other words, the alienation effect deliberately distances the audience from both the actor and the performance. In his essay, Brecht suggests how the alienation effects of Chinese opera might be used to develop theater reform in modern-day Europe, and more specifically, ein realistisches und revolutionares Theater; that is, Brecht's concept of epic theater (22.1: 206).Although Chinese opera provides the basis for Brecht's essay, Brecht's attitude towards Chinese opera throughout the course of the text is alternately laudatory and dismissive.3 While he praises Chinese theater practices such as the lack of a fourth wall, the actors' method of self-observation, and their ritualistic and highly stylized movements, Brecht also downplays the distinct Chineseness of these methods by noting that such alienation effects were also found auf primitiver Stufe schon bei theatralischen und bildnerischen Veranstaltungen der alten Volksjahrmarkte (22.1: 200). Brecht goes on to equate Chinese theater with mysticism and primitivism, and views Chinese theater as incapable of containing or expressing worthwhile social, political, or ideological motives. …

Christoph Schlingensiefs Bilderstörungsmaschine

The mechanisms of disruption in paradigmatic performances of Christoph Schlingensief like »Talk 2000« and »Chance 2000« which established his reputation as »agent provocateur« are to be investigated in this paper. With his artistic events and stagings that often integrated marginalized people Schlingensief aimed less at creating scandals, but at irritating the ways of perceiving societal reality. The paper illustrates the functionality of the »image disruption machine«, Schlin-gensief’s mode of achieving alienation effects that implies a subversive counter-strategy against commercialization and exclusion.

From Alienation Effects

This issue, guest-edited by poet and memoirist Nick Flynn, contains a diverse collection of poems, essays, and stories, from Eric Fair's essay Consequence, on being an interrogator at Abu Ghraib, to Major Jackson's list poem, "Why I Write Poetry." This stylistically varied issue features emerging poets like Samuel Amadon and Sophie Klahr, as well as established writers such as Steve Almond, Mark Slouka, D. A. Powell, Claudia Rankine, Lauren Groff, and others.