Overview

In Shakespeare, Brecht, and the Intercultural Sign renowned Brecht scholar Antony Tatlow offers a meditation on cultural forms or gestures that are adapted, translated, transformed, or absorbed by another. To demonstrate how intercultural readings or performances question the settled assumptions we bring to interpretations of familiar texts, Tatlow examines Chinese and Japanese versions of Shakespearean drama, the interplay between interpretations of Shakespeare and readings of Brecht, and, in turn, the relation of Brecht to Asian theatre. Ruminating on how, why, and to what effect knowledges and styles of performance pollinate across cultures, Tatlow demonstrates that the employment of one culture's material in the context of another defamiliarises the conventions of representation in an act that facilitates access to what previously had been culturally repressed. By reading the intercultural, Tatlow shows, we are able not only to historicise the effects of those repressions that create a social unconscious but gain access to what might otherwise have remained invisible. This remarkable study will interest students of cultural interaction and aesthetics, as well as readers with interests in theatre, Shakespeare, Brecht, China, and Japan.

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Reviews

This work by Antony Tatlow is timely, original, and provocatively and lucidly written. Its theoretical and analytic sophistication makes it a welcome exemplum of East-West comparative study-one that rings with the authority of a seasoned eyewitness no less than that of an erudite thinker. - Anthony Yu, University of Chicago An interesting and commendable contribution to Shakespeare studies and comparative literature. Tatlow has a cogent, complex, and distinctive point of view. - Hugh H. Grady, author of Shakespeare and Modernity: Early Modern to Millennium

This work by Antony Tatlow is timely, original, and provocatively and lucidly written. Its theoretical and analytic sophistication makes it a welcome exemplum of East-West comparative study-one that rings with the authority of a seasoned eyewitness no less than that of an erudite thinker. - Anthony Yu, University of Chicago An interesting and commendable contribution to Shakespeare studies and comparative literature. Tatlow has a cogent, complex, and distinctive point of view. - Hugh H. Grady, author of Shakespeare and Modernity: Early Modern to Millennium

Author Information

Antony Tatlow was Professor and Head of Comparative Literature at the University of Hong Kong for many years before assuming his current position as Professor of Comparative Literature and Coordinator of the Graduate Centre for Arts Research at the University of Dublin. His previous books include The Mask of Evil: Brecht’s Response to the Poetry, Theatre, and Thought of China and Japan.

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