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Walter Benjaminin teatterista

• Esa Kirkkopelto Helsingin yliopisto

DOI: https://doi.org/10.30665/av.74637

Abstract

Prosaic Stage – On the theatre of Walter Benjamin

Article asks the role and signification of theatre in the thought of Walter Benjamin by comparing his essays on Brecht´s epical theatre from the 1930´s with his doctoral thesis of 1919 on the literary theory in the Romanticism of Iena. The approach makes possible to present a more general question concerning the reasons why theatre is reinvented during the past century precisely as a scenic art and as an art of director. In his thesis, Benjamin defends an idea of a different kind of Romanticism which, against the prevailing bourgeois ideas, is politically revolutionary and “sober” by its expression. By assuming novel as the paradigm of work of art, the romantic literary theory accomplishes itself in the idea of “poetry as prose”. Benjamin´s own “Brechtian turn”, as well as the epical theatre he analyses, can be explained as a consequent continuation and critical explication of the former “prosaic turn”. In the “gesture” (Geste), which according to Brecht constitutes the basic element of scenic representation, can be recognized the same “estranging” and “retarding” dynamics and structure as in the “connexions” (Zusammenhang) of the romantic prose. Correspondingly, the “scenic turn” in modern theatre motivates itself by a more general historical change which, still today, continues to dislocate the modes of representation and social existence.