ABSTRACT
In this chapter the author situates Jameson’s recent study of Brecht, Brecht and Method, under the umbrella of Jameson’s overall Marxist project, relating his analysis of Brecht’s theatre to the theories of narrative and dialectics that inform Jameson’s own work. Jameson’s early Marxism and Form also posits a special relationship between literature and dialectical thinking. The ‘profound impersonality’ of Jameson’s approach to literary criticism is driven by the impetus to situate in a political sphere literary works that, at the level of their manifest content, appear to resist overt politicization. Brecht overcomes this fragmentation, this separation, in his own dialectical, plumpes Denken manner, by focusing upon what use things have. One of the most interesting characteristics of the Dreigroschenroman is how it not only shows us Brecht revisiting and revising his dramatic output in the 1920s, but how it also anticipates the great works such as Mother Courage and her Children.
