Representation and Reception  Paid

Brechtian 'Pedagogics of Theatre' and Critical Thinking

by Shehla Burney (Author)
©2018, Textbook, XXVIII, 94 Pages
The Arts

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Representation and Reception: Brechtian ‘Pedagogics of Theatre’ and Critical Thinking deploys German playwright Bertolt Brecht’s theory of drama and performance, what he calls "the pedagogics of theatre", to create modes of critical thinking in the classroom. Extrapolating on Brecht’s estranged forms of representation—narrative, story, montage, Verfremdüngseffeckt or alienation, tableaux, ostension (showing), gestus, masks and music—Burney constructs an original "3-R Pedagogy" or "spiral of semiosis"—"Rethinking/Replaying/Re-cognition"—that is designed to create critical thinking and "complex seeing". Her dramatic production of Brecht’s Lehrstück, or learning-play, The Exception and the Rule, for a non-literate, working-class audience in Hyderabad, India, critically analyses how audiences make meaning through image, word and ideology, gesture, memory, collective experience and personal
(hi)stories.

Cover
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction: The Poetics and Politics of Representation and Reception
The Learning Play
Pleasure/Instruction
Past/Present
Sign, Myth, and Meaning
Orientalism: Representation of the Other
Representing Africa
Aura and Authenticity
Brecht and Derrida
Burney’s 3-R Pedagogy
New Media Technologies and Representation
Chapters
References
Chapter One: Bertolt Brecht’s “Pedagogics of Theatre”: Image, Ideology, and Meaning
Ideology
Mimesis and Semiosis
Seeing and Doing
Everyday Theatre
Theatre as Event
Selective Inattention
Theatre and Sports
“Epic Theatre Is the Modern Theatre”
Brecht and Piscator
Brecht’s Grand Design
Montage
References
Chapter Two: A Theatre with Footnotes: Diacritics and Referentiality/Witnessing and Learning
Underlining Pedagogy
Punctuating Theatre
Acting in Quotation Marks
Witnessing and Learning
Witnessing as Knowing
The Learning-play: Witnessing and Voting
References
Chapter Three: “The Pregnant Moment”: Ideality, Gestus, and Tableau as Learning
Brecht and Eisenstein
Gestus as the Pedagogic Moment
Ostension as Inference of Meaning
Gesture as Intentionality
Subjectivity
Instant Re-play
The Conception and the Reality
The Berliner Ensemble’s Performances
Brecht as Classical Avant-gardism?
Deconstructing the East/West Dichotomy
The Intervention of the “Art of Living”
References
Chapter Four: Theatre as Metaphor of the Street: Brecht in the Basthi Across the Seas
Non-literate Working-class Audience
The Exception and the Rule
The Discourse of Theatre
The Production
Song, Music, and Dance
The Reception
Ethnography of Audiences and Reception
Complex Seeing
Banjara Hills
References
Chapter Five: Rethinking/Replaying/ Re-Cognition: My 3-R Pedagogy for Critical Thinking
What Is Critical Thinking?
Critical Thinking and Education
My 3-R Pedagogy
Rethinking
Replaying
Re-cognition
References
Afterword: The Possibility of Critical Thinking: Bringing the World to the Classroom
References
About the Author
Index
Pages:
XXVIII, 94
Year:
2018
ISBN (PAPERBACK):
9781433148507 (Active)
ISBN (EPUB):
9781433148576 (Active)
ISBN (PDF):
9781433148569 (Active)
Language:
English
Published:
New York, Bern, Berlin, Bruxelles, Frankfurt am Main, Oxford, Wien, 2018. XXVIII, 94 pp. 1 ill.

Shehla Burney is Professor of Cultural Studies and Education at Queen’s University, one of Canada’s leading universities. She holds a PhD from the University of Toronto, with an international award for her doctoral dissertation from the American Alliance for Theatre and Education at New York, 1989. She is also the recipient of three gold medals for her academic degrees. Her previous book, Pedagogy of the Other: Edward Said, Postcolonial Theory and Strategies for Critique (Peter Lang 2012) was well-received internationally. Dr. Burney’s research interests lie in contemporary critical and cultural theory, poststructuralist critique, postcolonialism, and critical pedagogy, which she innovatively applies to the study of media, representation, drama in education, and the semiotics of theatre reception.

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