This volume offers an examination of Brecht's largely forgotten theatrical fragments of a life of David, written just after the Great War but prior to Brecht winning the Kleist Prize in 1922 and the acclaim that would launch his extraordinary career. David J. Shepherd and Nicholas E. Johnson take as their starting point Brecht's own diaries from the time, which offer a vivid picture of the young Brecht shuttling between Munich and the family home in Augsburg, surrounded by friends, torn between women, desperate for success, and all the while with 'David on the brain'. The analysis of Brecht's David, along with his notebooks and diaries, reveals significant connections between the reception of the Biblical David and one of Germany's most tumultuous cultural periods. Drawing on theatrical experiments conducted with an ensemble from Trinity College Dublin, this volume includes the first ever translation of the David fragments in English, an extensive discussion of the theatrical afterlife of David in the early twentieth century as well as new interdisciplinary insights into the early Brecht: a writer entranced by the biblical David and utterly committed to translating the biblical tradition into his own evolving theatrical idiom.

"This volume offers an examination of Brecht's largely forgotten theatrical fragments of a life of David, written just after the Great War but prior to Brecht winning the Kleist Prize in 1922 and the acclaim that would launch his extraordinary career. David J. Shepherd and Nicholas E. Johnson take as their starting point Brecht's own diaries from the time, which offer a vivid picture of the young Brecht shuttling between Munich and the family home in Augsburg, surrounded by friends, torn between women, desperate for success, and all the while with 'David on the brain'. The analysis of Brecht's David, along with his notebooks and diaries, reveals significant connections between the reception of the Biblical David and one of Germany's most tumultuous cultural periods. Drawing on theatrical experiments conducted with an ensemble from Trinity College Dublin, this volume includes the first ever translation of the David fragments in English, an extensive discussion of the theatrical afterlife of David in the early twentieth century as well as new interdisciplinary insights into the early Brecht: a writer entranced by the biblical David and utterly committed to translating the biblical tradition into his own evolving theatrical idiom"--Page 4 of cover.

This volume offers an examination of Brecht's largely forgotten theatrical fragments of a life of David, written just after the Great War but prior to Brecht winning the Kleist Prize in 1922 and the acclaim that would launch his extraordinary career. David J. Shepherd and Nicholas E. Johnson take as their starting point Brecht's own diaries from the time, which offer a vivid picture of the young Brecht shuttling between Munich and the family home in Augsburg, surrounded by friends, torn between women, desperate for success, and all the while with 'David on the brain'. The analysis of Brecht's David, along with his notebooks and diaries, reveals significant connections between the reception of the Biblical David and one of Germany's most tumultuous cultural periods. Drawing on theatrical experiments conducted with an ensemble from Trinity College Dublin, this volume includes the first ever translation of the David fragments in English, an extensive discussion of the theatrical afterlife of David in the early twentieth century as well as new interdisciplinary insights into the early Brecht: a writer entranced by the biblical David and utterly committed to translating the biblical tradition into his own evolving theatrical idiom.

Published in English for the first time, Refugee Conversations is a delightful work that reveals Brecht as a master of comic satire. Written swiftly in the opening years of the Second World War, the dialogues have an urgent contemporary relevance to a Europe once again witnessing populations on the move. The premise is simple: two refugees from Nazi Germany meet in a railway cafe and discuss the current state of the world. They are a bourgeois Jewish physicist and a left-leaning worker. Their world views, their voices and their social experience clash horribly, but they find they have unexpected common ground – especially in their more recent experience of the surreal twists and turns of life in exile, the bureaucracy, and the pathetic failings of the societies that are their unwilling hosts. Their conversations are light and swift moving, the subjects under discussion extremely various: beer, cigars, the Germans' love of order, their education and experience of life, art, pornography, politics, 'great men', morality, seriousness, Switzerland, America ... despite the circumstances of both characters there is a wonderfully whimsical serendipity about their dialogue, the logic and the connections often delightfully absurd. This edition features a full introduction and notes by Professor Tom Kuhn (St Hugh's College, University of Oxford, UK).

Annual volume, this time featuring special sections on Brecht's dramatic fragments and on comedy in post-Brechtian theater, along with a variety of other contributions. Published for the International Brecht Society, the Brecht Yearbook is the central scholarly forum for discussion of Brecht's life and work and of topics of particular interest to him, especially the politics of literatureand of theater in a global context. It embraces a wide variety of perspectives and approaches and, like Brecht himself, is committed to the use value of literature, theater, and theory. Volume 44 features the first publication of Günter Kunert's translation of Edgar Lee Masters's poem "The Hill" with handwritten annotations by Brecht. A special section, "Brecht's Dramatic Fragments," includes essays on the unresolved tension between individual and collectivist resistance in Fatzer, the fragmentary aesthetic of Fleischhacker, and the first English translation and performance of the David fragments. The next section, "Pure Joke: The Comedy of Theater since Brecht," features articles on the poetics of interruption in the epilogue to The Good Person of Szechwan, Heiner Müller's Hamletmachine as theater of affirmation, a reassessment of the harlequin and the chorus in post-Brechtian performance, and the performative gestures of quotation in contemporary reality-satire. The volume also includes essays on capitalist guilt and debt in The Debts of Mister Julius Caesar, Heiner Müller's "Keuneresque" interview strategies, the 1962 world premiere of The Threepenny Opera in Yiddish, and Brecht's reception of Mao Tse-tung in two of his poems. Contributors include Gerrit-Jan Berendse, André Fischer, Phoebe von Held, Nicholas E. Johnson, Christian Kirchmeier, Günter Kunert, Nikolaus Müller-Schöll, Stephan Pabst, Corina L. Petrescu, David Shepherd, Katrin Trüstedt, Uwe Wirth, Burkhardt Wolf, and Xue Song. Editor Markus Wessendorf is aProfessor in the Department of Theatre and Dance at the University of Hawai'i at Manoa in Honolulu.

This book surveys the current landscape of Old Testament studies, offering readers a concise guide to contemporary academic discussions. Bringing together a diverse group of experts, it provides an informed introduction to the many fields of Old Testament research by recognized scholars, presents basic questions in each subfield, surveys the primary methods of answering these questions, engages prominent solutions, and evaluates relevant and up-to-date resources. It is an extensive guide to current research and an ideal supplemental textbook for a variety of courses on the Old Testament. Contributors include Samuel Boyd, Mark Brett, Aubrey Buster, M. Daniel Carroll R., Stephen Chapman, Stephen L. Cook, Matthew Coomber, Katherine Davis, Katharine Dell, Stephen Dempster, Christopher J. Fresch, Diedre Fulton, Rachelle Gilmour, Jamie Grant, H. H. Hardy II, Ralph Hawkins, Richard S. Hess, John W. Hilber, Brad E. Kelle, Will Kynes, David Lamb, Bo Lim, Drew Longacre, Tremper Longman III, Sandra Richter, Ken Ristau, Jordan Ryan, Cynthia Shafer-Elliott, Jason M. Silverman, Brent A. Strawn, C. A. Strine, Heath Thomas, Daniel Timmer, and Eric J. Tully.

Beckett and media provides the first sustained examination of the relationship between Beckett and media technologies. The book analyses the rich variety of technical objects, semiotic arrangements, communication processes and forms of data processing that Beckett’s work so uniquely engages with, as well as those that – in historically changing configurations – determine the continuing performance, the audience reception, and the scholarly study of this work. Beckett and media draws on a variety of innovative theoretical approaches, such as media archaeology, in order to discuss Beckett’s intermedial oeuvre. As such, the book engages with Beckett as a media artist and examines the way his engagement with media technologies continues to speak to our cultural situation.