Overview

All Theater Is Revolutionary Theater is the first book to consider why, in the Western tradition (and only in the Western tradition), theatrical drama is regarded as its own literary or poetic type, when the criteria needed to differentiate drama from other forms of writing do not resemble the criteria by which types of prose or verse are ordinarily distinguished. Through close readings of such playwrights as Beckett, Brecht, Buchner, Eliot, Shaw, Wedekind, and Robert Wilson, Benjamin Bennett looks at the relationship between literature and drama, identifying typical problems in the development of dramatic literature and exploring how the uncomfortable association with theatrical performance affects the operation of drama in literary history.Bennett's historical investigations into theoretical works ranging from Aristotle to Artaud, Brecht, and Diderot suggest that the attempt to include drama in the system of Western literature causes certain specific incongruities that, in his view, have the salutary effect of preserving the otherwise endangered possibility of a truly liberal, progressive, or revolutionary literature.

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Reviews

Benjamin Bennett is a learned, original, and admirable scholarly critic, at once theoretical and splendidly Old Historical. He has very few living peers among students of German literature and of drama. All Theater Is Revolutionary Theater is a superb guide to the deep reading of Brecht, Buchner, Hofmannsthal, and others. It has changed many aspects of my own thinking about dramatic forms. -Harold Bloom

Benjamin Bennett is a learned, original, and admirable scholarly critic, at once theoretical and splendidly Old Historical. He has very few living peers among students of German literature and of drama. All Theater Is Revolutionary Theater is a superb guide to the deep reading of Brecht, Buchner, Hofmannsthal, and others. It has changed many aspects of my own thinking about dramatic forms. -Harold Bloom In All Theater is Revolutionary Theater, Benjamin Bennett seizes the drama's 'revolutionary' disruption of the categories of literature and tracks the originary interplay between dramatic writing and theatrical embodiment from Aristotle to Artaud, taking in Buchner and Brecht and Beckett, Diderot and Shaw, and much else along the way. The chapter 'Performance and the Exposure of Hermeneutics' alone is worth the price of admission, and his framing of the potentially totalitarian impulse of contemporary performance should not be missed. Bennett is the most tenacious, and rewarding, theorist of modern drama writing today. -W. B. Worthen, University of California, Berkeley Benjamin Bennett shows just how unusual and odd dramatic literature is, hovering between the page and the stage, and he demonstrates that this uneasy position must become the point of departure for any theory of drama and theater as well as for any good reading of dramatic literature. -Martin Puchner, Cornell University For drama to become theater that is revolutionary theater, there must be in the passage from the page to the stage what is required of literature with any revolutionary promise-a leap across the abyss between writing and 'brute reality.' A distinguished theorist of drama as a literary genre in that perilous sense, as well as the occurrence of the literary as a human act, Benjamin Bennett has not been taken up sufficiently by performance theorists, to their loss. Maybe this book will change that. -Herbert Blau, Byron W. and Alice L. Lockwood Professor of the Humanities, University of Washington

Author Information

Benjamin Bennett is Kenan Professor of German at the University of Virginia. His many books include Theater As Problem: Modern Drama and Its Place in Literature, Beyond Theory: Eighteenth-Century German Literature and the Poetics of Irony (both from Cornell), and Goethe as Woman: The Undoing of Literature. His first book, Modern Drama and German Classicism: Renaissance from Lessing to Brecht (also from Cornell), won the MLA's James Russell Lowell Prize.

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