ABSTRACT

Alienation is one of the key concepts in Bertolt Brecht's dramaturgical system. It is deeply interwoven and in part overlaps with other Brechtian categories such as the epic, gestus, anti-Aristotelianism, dialectics and the didactic play. Brecht's reflections on acting as a technique of alienation can be taken as a point of departure for considering the structural, technical, political and philosophical principles involved in his aesthetic theory at large. From the mid twenties, Brecht's theory begins to take on firmer shapes, a development that coincides with a new alliance with Marxism and its theoretical concern with social alienation. The appropriate aesthetic response to an alienated world is the creation of a correspondingly alienating drama. Alienation as an encounter with alterity — as an experience of categorical incomprehension in the face of a world that is experienced as absolute other — becomes replaced by a form of estrangement that promotes comprehension by way of distanciation and contextual reconfiguration.