Culture & Critical Categories: Drama

Critical Categories & Culture: World Drama Deborah Griggs Berlin, May 2015 The main propositions of this paper are 1) that as with all communication codes and frameworks of understanding, critical methodology within the literary and dramatic arts is culture bound and 2) that in the moment where the scope of study is expanded to world literature and world drama, it is important to first investigate the culture-bound characteristics of the critical concepts and strategies to be employed. Although the propositions apply to both literature and drama, the concrete examples used in the paper are limited to drama. Culture-bound concepts Even the most seemingly straightforward critical concepts are steeped in the times and places in which they are conceived. They are further influenced by the traditions from which they see themselves spring. Within the framework of literary scholarship, critical concepts construct grammars that are then applied to works with the aim of revealing their structure and meaning. Yet while critical approaches spring up, develop, and transform in a self-conscious and seemingly visible manner, the culture-bound aspects of core concepts sometimes remain veiled or neglected in theoretical discussion. As a ubiquitous concept applied to everything from schools of thought to artistic styles, dramatic methods, or fictitious characters, realism is a term that under even cursory examination reveals a cultural contingency not always taken adequately into account. Considered as literary movement, for example, realism is often considered as part of a historical progression. An overview of such movements or artistic styles might therefore discuss romanticism as a response to (Western) industrialization and realism as a kind of response to romanticism. For many years, such connections were introduced as a means of providing a kind of narrative framework for these concepts. As cultural concerns have changed, however, the understanding of theoretical constructs has also changed. Over the last decades, for example, media studies has made a case for artistic movements arising in concert with developments in media, technology, and meta-structures of discourse. Indicative of this media focus is Friedrich Kittler's discussion of German Romanticism as a response to what he called the discourse network in Germany around 1800. This discourse network was the result of a national liberalization of education that had at its center the goals of mass literacy and a broad network of writer-reader relationships. Within the framework of this endeavor, the state encouraged and trained mothers to teach their children phonetics. According to Kittler's analysis, this early teaching led to the child's association between the mother's 'mouth' and the act of speaking, encouraging an idea of language as deeply associated with maternity and early orality. Through the association of language with nourishment, self-discovery, and nature, Kittler sees the source of a romantic relationship between language and nature, language and the soul. The medium of the mother's voice and the domestic context of reading are therefore his key to understanding the romantic period in Germany. Kittler similarly sees a media-related connection to realism by viewing it as a response to the gramophone, which, by arbitrarily recording all noise in the environment, first made us aware that human speech is 'just another noise.' While this thought may not seem surprising in the present age of electronically mediated voices, pixels and computer-based speech recognition, in a time in which language was considered to be something arising out of the soul, the idea of language as noise might have been a shock. Further, if the recording medium is considered as an impetus for the scientific investigation of phonetics and the study of language as physical sound waves and modulation, then a connection between realism and media technology is not far behind. Of course, to view human life as a response to technology would also be a case of cultural teleology, for in it lies a blindered vision of cultural purpose cutting a very narrow path through human thought and nature. Inter- and multicultural critics should remain aware of the fact that the 'stories' made up about theories or patterns of thought are culture-bound fictions that reveal deep cultural values, attitudes and beliefs. For this reason, critical concepts such as realism are very slippery, whether used to identify a literary style, a particular work, or a character. The term becomes culturally even more slippery if its foundation in plausibility is taken into account. Griggs: Culture & Critical Categories 2 The idea of realism depends on the idea of plausibility, and ideas about what is plausible are based on assumptions arising from experience or cultural norms— assumptions about anything from the way the living room of a middle-class family might look, to the way a character might act in a certain situation, to ideas about what is funny. In Arthur Miller's Death of A Salesman, for example, would it be plausible to picture a baby grand piano or a crystal chandelier in the Loman's living room? Would it be plausible for Linda Loman to be confused at Willy's inner torment in the face of his sense of failure? Would it be plausible for Biff to shrug off his father's adultery? How we answer these questions relates to what we find plausible. What priorities would a middle-class family set on owning a car, as opposed to owning a baby grand? Is it more likely that Biff will be interested in football than classical music? How important is material success in the viewer's culture? What are the pressures on a man to be successful? How much of his identity is at stake? How do children rely on their parents for their own identity? How important is fidelity in marriage? In other words, how 'realistic' is the setting; how plausible are the conflicts and the actions of these characters; and how does sense of the plausible relate to the viewer's cultural belonging and social experience? If a US audience watched a Japanese Kabuki play in which a character committed ritual suicide because a family member had been insulted, would viewers find this emotionally plausible or realistic? Perhaps they would allow it as part of a ritual past that no longer has a basis in modern culture; yet Japanese author and playwright Yukio Mishima committed ritual suicide (seppuku) in 1970 because he had failed to convince a group of like-minded traditionalists to commit to a plan to return to traditional Japanese values. Without knowing the historical fact, would that audience identify this behavior as plausible? And even if they decided that seppuku was no longer a plausible response to a problem of honor, would they find the contemporary Japanese idea of honor any more plausible? Realism depends on cultural understanding. Discussions of modernism in the West also indirectly relate to assumptions about realism in that they include discussion of the shift in cultural perceptions of reality as a result of developments in scientific theory. Whether the theory is Darwin's theory of evolution, Nietzsche's philosophical standpoint that God is dead, Marx's view of economics as the driving force in social reality or Freud's map of the psyche—Western realism portrays a view of human behavior and the human Griggs: Culture & Critical Categories 3 condition as the relate to economics, politics, and social structures; and a view of emotions as they relate to the workings and fundamental conflicts of the psyche. When such concepts are employed in analysis, clarifying the cultural and philosophical contexts surrounding them can enrich the perceived layering of meanings within a work or attributed to the work as well as the resonance between the work and its cultural context. Culture-bound viewpoints…the case of drama Individual concepts are not the only culture-bound aspect of critical analysis. Understanding the nature of art and the strategies for approaching it critically arise within the context of culture. For the purpose of this paper, cultural context refers to the position of an art form as an institutionalized element of culture and public discourse as well as to the values, attitudes and beliefs that influence theme, content and form. Performance arts are particularly easy to recognize in their public aspect. Theater as a Public Institution In his book Transformation of the Public Sphere, German philosopher and sociologist Jürgen Habermas examines the concept of the public and its significance for culture. According to Habermans, the public sphere is the place where a culture directly and often consciously presents itself to its members or to the world, a place of self-representation. It also a location where cultures engage in public discourse, that is, a space in which different groups may engage in power struggles or where existing values, attitudes and beliefs may be upheld or attacked through public conversations. As a performed event, drama is public; as an entity that may be supported either by government subsidies or public audiences, theater is a public institution. Theater and its products are therefore influenced by the general structure of the public sphere at any given time. Several aspects of the concept public must be understood before we can investigate specific effects of the public sphere on theater or drama. On the one hand, the term public suggests accessibility: public events and public places are those accessible to all. On the other hand, it may suggest representation: public buildings are not called such because they are always Griggs: Culture & Critical Categories 4 accessible, but because they are representative of some cumulative identity, whether of 'the people' or of the institution in charge of the public wellbeing and public order. Along the same lines, a public event may not be one to which all are invited, but one which is somehow representative for the public. Beyond these meanings, there are also the ideas of public opinion or the public domain, both referring to the people as a body or an audience creating a public entity in communication or relationship to a government or culture. It is from this idea that such concepts as public justice, public hearing, or public outrage stem, and also the concepts of publishing, publication, publicity or public performance. All of these various aspects of the public join to create the public sphere. (Habermas 13-14) Understanding these different aspects of the term public can help us see how theater might be viewed as a public institution. Like public buildings, the theater may be one of the public institutions—such as the systems of justice or education— which are provided legitimacy and status through the government; or, like publications, publicity or, more appropriately, publicly accessible media, the theater may be a public institution provided legitimacy by what we might call the 'public body.' Where the theater stands in relation to its legitimacy as a public institution will influence the drama that we see on the stage and the viewer expectations regarding its general purpose of being. It is important to note that this last statement draws a clear distinction between the theater as an institution and drama as an artistic product. In its characteristic as a cultural institution, Western theater is a place of entertainment and/or confrontation, where ideas, values and experiences 'floating around' in the public sphere at any given time may be reflected, as well as a place where emerging ideas may be formulated or further developed. These ideas may relate to the attitudes and values expressed in a play or the aesthetic values expressed by its form. Furthermore, in this function as a forum for ideas, the theater or the individual drama can be viewed as an entity that is holding a 'conversation' or 'discourse' with the public audience, or as an entity facilitating an audience's conversation with itself and its culture. This is the role of theater as a public forum or an element of public discourse. The term drama, on the other hand, will be employed here to point to plays themselves and their qualities of content and form. Griggs: Culture & Critical Categories 5 From this perspective, drama does not exist without theater and theater does not exist without drama. Thus, an examination of the theater as a cultural institution in which plays are produced and performed will shed light on the meaning of a drama, just as the examination of individual dramas will shed light on the role of the institution theater at any given time. Western European Drama and the Public Sphere Because of the cultural and artistic diversity within the region identified as Western Europe, it is difficult to generalize the effects of the public sphere on Western European drama. However, an examination of a few concrete situations will reveal the way in which the structure of the public sphere has affected the institution of theater and therefore dramatic form or content. Feudalism is a common, but much disputed word, due to the diversity of specific arrangements between lords and vassals or lords and peasants in the various regions or social groups being described as feudal. The most basic meaning, however, describes an arrangement in which an overlord grants segments of land (fiefs) to vassals, who pledge their loyalty in return, to include military service. The vassal might then grant land in the same way, thereby creating complex and loosely defined levels of hierarchy or social 'classes.' At the bottom level, peasants receive protection and guarantee of regulated social order in exchange for some form of economic and/or political subservience, whether this be in the form of military service, adherence to systems of law or taxation, or the like. This bottom layer of feudalism overlaps with structures called seignorialism or manorialism. Important for this discussion is the differentiation between a relatively loosely organized feudal structure and the highly centralized absolute monarchies associated with the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. This last point is especially important for any discussion of the public sphere since in the feudal structure, there is a series of individual 'local' cultures as opposed to the more centralized culture of the monarchy. The feudalism described by Habermas in his book shows the following characteristics: In the feudal structure there was no public sphere in the modern sense of a centralized body of political and social representation or discourse. While the overlord was a figure of cumulative power, he was not necessarily a culturally Griggs: Culture & Critical Categories 6 representational figure. For the peasants of any given fiefdom, it was the vassal or lord who embodied their social or cultural identity. Also, because loyalty in many feudal systems ended with the death of a vassal or overlord, there was not the kind of continuity that one might see in a monarchy based on succession, making the manifestation of a stable, coherent culture unlikely. Similarly, there was no centrally coherent public sphere, but only a loosely connection accumulation of locally defined public contexts. The church, on the other hand, was a centralized and representative embodiment of the collective intellectual and spiritual sphere. Education was in the hands of the church—the 'house' of intellectual thought—and therefore closed to what we would call the public in terms of ownership. In this structure, Habermas sees no private persons in the sense we use the word today: the feudal lord was part of the ruling structure and therefore a public figure; and although the common person had some sense of what we would now call the private, he was not an officially recognized factor in any public identity or culture, but only served it. In the example above, it is clear that feudal lords (or vassals) would be classified as public figures but would not form a cohesive public body overall. Within the fiefdom and certainly between fiefdoms, peasants were not factors in an official public culture and so were communicated to (for example, through writs or proclamations) but not communicated with (through voting or in any kind of public forum). There was therefore little representation of culture in centralized public institutions or even necessarily in standardized social norms or classes. In keeping with this picture, the public activities that took place consisted mainly of local fairs, tournaments, or displays of knighthood--entertainments for the people, displays of power by the feudal lords. Other fair entertainments—e.g., minstrel singing, dancing or mime—were most likely remnants or products of pagan ritual and therefore belonged to the people in the sense that they were self-organized and perpetuated, a part of what might be called the 'folk culture.' In this structure, theater as a centralized social institution would be unlikely. There was, however, a centralized location of spiritual belief and intellectual thought in the Church, one capable of overriding the isolated microcultures of the fiefdoms to form a coherent and representational public identity. Because of this capacity, it was the Church that became a central locale of early formal dramatic Griggs: Culture & Critical Categories 7 representation and therefore important to the development of theater in Western Europe. This early drama consisted of dramatic ritual manifesting itself in liturgical ceremonies requiring dialogue between priest and choir. It also manifested itself in passion plays; in miracle or mystery plays; and, later, in morality plays. Because these plays may be seen as an attempt of the Church to communicate belief to the people and legitimize itself as a seat of worldly power before the people, we would not consider this kind of theater as taking part in a public discourse of the kind one might see today. It is also clear that the drama produced in this context would not reflect the lives of the common person from their own perspective but from one outside of their everyday lives and realm of personal power. These plays may be described as representational of the Church, rather than ‘of' the people. Drama at this time did not entertain or reflect on the attitudes or views of the audience, but instructed the audience. The great Western European monarchies of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries gave rise to a different kind of public sphere. Habermas notes characteristics of these monarchies relating to the public sphere. The Renaissance brought with it the dissolution of the feudal system and the rise of the great monarchies in Western Europe. Under the supreme rule of the monarch, noble peers no longer embodied their own regional public identity, but formed an organized public domain in a defined realm. The court became a controlling force in centralized cultural self-representation, as well as a locale for such representation. Education was still tied to the Church, but education began to vie with noble birth as means for individuals to enter a state of honor and/or favor in the representational structure of the court. Still, the noble was the primary culturally representative, the symbolic public personage. Commoners still had no socially recognized, personal identity in the collective structure. Although the Church was still a decisive force in government, it had received blows to its power base through Great Schism, the English rejection of the Pope and the Reformation. Religion wrangled with government for power. Griggs: Culture & Critical Categories 8 While the position of the monarch solidified in sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, an increased privatization of commerce and the appearance of stock-holding companies led to the development of a small, but increasingly powerful prebourgeois class. With the advent of the printing press toward the end of the sixteenth century, a reading public developed. This reading audience consisted of nobles by birth; members of the court; a new nobility, emerging on the basis of education or public office; and a small upper segment of the pre-bourgeois class, consisting of those successful in commerce. As those outside the court gained the ability to acquire education and economic power, as well as to become informed and to disseminate ideas among the populous, the first signs of a public sphere, as we know it, became evident. Against the backdrop described above, it is easy to see how a broader base of accessibility to education and the advent of the monarchy could lead to the increased secularization of art. Much entertainment still took place in public squares and venues. Meanwhile, dramatic performance moved from the church to the court or to a public domain controlled by the monarchical law and resulted in a corresponding shift in content, from purely religious drama to drama generally celebrating the noble personage, the king, or courtly ideals. This shift in locale and content revealed a changing position of the institution of theater within the social structure. Nevertheless, just as the common people were being instructed by the Church in the passion, miracle or morality plays, they were performed for in the sense that they were not seeing stories about their own lives or views, but the lives of those deemed significant or the views deemed appropriate by the dominant culture, which was, in turn, controlled by the monarch. Several examples of this influence can be seen in the French theater under Louis XIV In terms of the effects of the monarchical social structure on the institution of theater, there is the case of the French playwright Molière the influence of the Louis XIV on drama designed for public consumption outside of the court. One aspect of the monarch's influence was royal patronage. After 1658 or so, Molière's troupe enjoyed the king's patronage, a vital factor in the success of a playwright or company, since patronage meant funding and/or favor that would enable a Griggs: Culture & Critical Categories 9 company to survive and attract an audience eager to find favor with the king and therefore follow his tastes. Patronage, however, did not universally ensure the acceptance of all material by a playwright or company, as demonstrated in the case of Moliere's Tartuffe, first performed for Louis XIV in May 1664. The play's thematic focus is the religious hypocrisy of the character of Tartuffe, who uses religious piety as a guise for ingratiating himself to patriarchal head of a small family, thus alienating him from wife, son and daughter. At the same time that Tartuffe is inciting these family conflicts, he is attempting to coerce the beautiful matron of the household into an illicit relationship with him. The play was banned as offensive to religious sensibilities, which resulted in repeated petitions from Moliere requesting that the ban be lifted. The first petition was written in August 1664, the second in 1667, and the third in 1669. In the second petition, we clearly see Louis' absolute control of culture: It is indeed an act of temerity on my part to come and importune a great monarch in the midst of his glorious conquests, but, my position being what it is, where am I to find protection, Sire, except where I am now seeking it? Whose aid can I solicit against the authority of the power which is bearing so hardly upon me unless it be that of the source of all power and authority, the just dispenser of absolute commands, the sovereign judge and master of all? (Molière, 106) In the above, Moliere's absolute acceptance of absolute power is clearly visible. There is no argument against a specific analysis of the play or against a judgment based on some kind of objective law—think of laws regarding pornography and how someone seeking to appeal a ban on a particular book or film might argue a point based on definitions or legal precedent—but there is only the appeal to the favor of the king, an appeal seeking to indirectly discredit those who might be influencing the king. This situation reveals how the public sphere is directly and explicitly influenced by the tastes of the monarch or selected advisors (including the clergy), more than by any public opinion in our modern sense of the word. The situation also reveals how the institution theater and its products can be influenced by the public sphere as it is embodied by the king and his court. Continuing with the example of France, in the eighteenth century, there is a growing sense of a public sphere in the more modern sense. The emergence of Griggs: Culture & Critical Categories 10 more established professional classes (e.g., lawyers, doctors, administrators) and prospering capitalists (e.g., bankers, merchants, publishers, manufacturers) made for an educated reading public and one which could pay for the theater. Also emerging in this new cultural scene was the professional critic, in whose role we can see the public self-selecting those of its members who would influence taste, thought and morals. With this new public sphere and with the possibility of organized resonance from audiences, the theater began responding more exclusively to the tastes and interests of the public audience. In this environment another specific instance of interaction between the public sphere, the monarch and the theater can be discovered, that in conjunction with Pierre Caron de Beaumarchais' play The Marriage of Figaro. Whether Beaumarchais was being overtly political by presenting a comic hero from the servant class who was not only cleverer than his master, but no better or worse than his master, is disputed. Beaumarchais' first 'Figaro-play,' The Barber of Seville reveals a Figaro who is a clever trickster and generally smarter than his social better, Count Almaviva. The Count wants to woo a woman (Rosine) who has been locked up by her guardian— an man much too old for her who is speculating on a forced marriage which will secure for him not only the young beauty, but her fortune. Figaro encounters the Count pining away below Rosine's window, clueless as to how to find access to the object of his longing. The plot focuses on the machinations which help the Count obtain his goal, all of which are designed and carried out by Figaro. Although this type of character—the clever servant—is traditional to comedy, Beaumarchais departs from tradition by providing a detailed history of Figaro's life and thus presenting a fullness of personality unusual to the traditional stock character. In The Marriage of Figaro, as scholar Joseph Reish points out in his essay "Revolution: The Three Changing Faces of Figaro," Beaumarchais goes one step further presenting a Figaro who "openly flaunts his mental prowess and asks why this factor and not family and name should be the measure in determining social importance." In this play, Figaro's class is precisely identified: he is below the professional class of lawyers and doctors, but above the class of ordinary peasants. That the Count is seen to 'give' Figaro his 'peasant bride' further establishes the class structure. Further, the Count attempts to incur the droigt de seigneur, a practice relating the Griggs: Culture & Critical Categories 11 seignorialism (already related in this commentary to feudal social structures) which allows the lord to sleep with the brides falling under his jurisdiction on their wedding nights. By the time the Marriage of Figaro is performed, the practice is dated. It is thus reasonable in terms of general cultural values that he be foiled. However, in this play, Figaro does not use his cleverness for his master's purposes, but to foil his master's purpose. He not only pits himself against his master, but gains the support of the Countess in working against her own husband, who is found to be romantically (and morally) wanting. And as Reish states in his essay: Airing his grievances publicly is the major thrust of Figaro's strategy; he intends to dishonor the lord in front of his vassals. Figaro manipulates things so that the Count must disavow any claim to the 'droigt de seigneur' in a public forum. (Reish) It is the 'public' nature of Figaro's fight, though not the particular subject of Reish's essay, that is interesting here. This aspect of 'appealing to the public' helped make Figaro's character and the play so controversial—regardless of whether Beaumarchais was consciously provoking authority or not in his comedy—and it was the problem of public effect of his speech in the play that occasioned bans. As in the case of Moliere's Tartuffe under Louis XIV, the performance of Beaumarchais' Marriage was prohibited by Louis XVI, who was "appalled by the play's impertinences." (Wood, 23) Under the type of feudalism described by Habermas, the form that much early Western European drama took was influenced by the Church, which was an identifiable, centralized locale of culture. From the Habermasian view, it was also a cultural institution interested in asserting its influence, thus interested in 'representing itself' before the people. The shift from actual church ritual to the passion or miracle play is one that might be viewed as a move from a religious ritual to an artistic product. It may be argued at which point dramatized ritual stops being religious practice and becomes theater; however, no matter where one draws the line, the general dynamic is important to recognize since the move from religious ritual to artistic representation is one that can be observed in almost all regions of the world and understanding the remnants of the religious in modern drama is an important cultural observation. The dynamic of mutual influence is clear here: the monarchical structure may be seen to influence the theater as a cultural institution and the artistic products Griggs: Culture & Critical Categories 12 (dramas) produced within it, just as changing social structures may be explicitly or implicitly reflected in the content or reception of a play. The same strategies can be employed to examine the connection between the structure of the public sphere and the institution theater in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries or discovering explicit and implicit reference to cultural values and attitudes in critical reception and analysis. Modern Western Drama in Cultural Context Several significant aspects of Western thought in the twentieth century connect to modern Western drama. Modernism may be described as connecting to the kind of desacralization described by Walter Benjamin and therefore to connected shifts in scientific theory; to the idea humans are on their own when it comes to developing ethical and moral codes; to the weakening influence of the Church in the public sphere; and/or to the increased focus on the individual. It may also be connected to the continuing struggle with language, meaning and doubt regarding the value of human existence that became a central theme in the twentieth centure. These observations were presented in relation to general broad cultural experiences in the West. Epic Theater & Public Discourse Walter Benjamin's discussion of Bertolt Brecht's epic theater reveals relations between the theatrical medium and twentieth century experiment. According to Benjamin, the desacralized stage moves away from the illusionist theater and the causal plot. It further changes the relationship between the audience, the actor and the play, encouraging all parties to remain at a critical distance from the play in order to promote the discovery of social, political and philosophical content on which everyone must 'take a stand.' In order to more clearly see Brecht's work in relation to the institution of theater, the public sphere and cultural context, one must closely examine the cultural context that Brecht experienced, as well as the situation of the theater as Brecht was beginning his work. One aspect of culture Brecht that Brecht perceived was the social failure of capitalism and the human failure of nationalism, which he came to denounce after his experiences in World War I. For many Germans, the gruesome events of World Griggs: Culture & Critical Categories 13 War I were distant statistics and stories represented in a press that did not reach many rural areas. For Brecht, they were a reality. The expression of his distress may be seen in his conception of a theater of interruption, of taking a stand, of rejecting romantic visions of the patriotic. Of the connection between war trauma and modernist thought, scholar Margaret Higgonet writes: The interconnection between the symptoms of trauma and a widespread explanation of the rise of modernism gives this question special weight. Susan Stanford Friedman writes in her study of H. D. that "Art produced after the First World War recorded the emotional aspect of this crisis; despair, hopelessness, paralysis, angst, and a sense of meaninglessness, . . . chaos, and fragmentation of material reality." 55 Modernist writing, she explains, focused on the "agency of language" as a vehicle of meaning (ibid.). For some, trauma writing was defined by a fragmentary juxtaposition of intense moments and images, as emotionally powerful wording erupted in response to the war experience. It stood in opposition to the exhausted, cliché discourse of patriotism and traditional values that Henry James and Hemingway declined as overstrained and obscene. 56 As Edith Wharton wrote, "the meaning had evaporated out of lots of our old words, as if the general smash-up had broken their stoppers." 57 (Higgonet, 102) Coupled with this disillusionment was the experience of the postwar social and economic chaos exacerbated by the harsh conditions of the Treaty of Versailles. In his article on the relationship between the urban context of post-WWI Berlin and Brecht's Threepenny Opera, David L. Pike writes: The urban thresholds of begging, prostitution, crime, prisons, executions, and public festivals...were rendered as bourgeois theatre, thus revealing their dependence upon the bourgeois sphere. The epic theatre, meanwhile, the Berlin experience of watching the Dreigroschenoper, prefigured a materialistic, critical theory of modernity in a city where humanity had no more currency than as a commodity of the bourgeoisie. The above suggests some of the probable connections between the cultural context that Brecht experienced and his concept of theater or specific thematic elements within his work. Added to this is the context of the theater as an institution in Germany of the 1920's. Griggs: Culture & Critical Categories 14 According to scholar Friedrich Dieckmann, except for the Volkstheater (popular regional theater, usually in dialect) of Southern Germany, the theater in Germany of the 1920's was undergoing a decline in popularity as a result of the fascination with film. One of Brecht's goals, Dieckmann claims, was to resuscitate the medium by integrating the "aesthetic and technique of the new entertainment, the silent film" with the "cooperative craftsmanship" of the theater, which Brecht associated with "the old, preindustrial time." (Dieckmann, 12) Thinking along these lines, one might see in the episodic plot, a structure of scenes that more closely resembles film montage than the unified causal action of traditional drama. One might also see in the exaggerated gestures and movements of the silent film actor, an element of style and method creating distance between the audience and the actor, a distance that may have contributed to the style later associated with the alienation effect of Brecht's epic theater. Other aspects of theatricalism, elements or devices within the play which make the audience aware of the theatrical mechanism, used by Brecht in his plays were elements of set design that distracted spectators, hindering them from 'losing themselves' in the world of the play, or stage events that interrupted the action. In the case of Trommeln in der Nacht (Drums in the Night), produced in 1922, Brecht included the following disruptive elements: At the premiere, Brecht installed banners in the auditorium with phrases from the play including "Glotzt nicht so romantisch!" ["Stop that romantic staring!"]. These instructions to the audience aimed to destroy the illusion of watching "real life" and thereby to overcome passive reception. Brecht sought not merely to entertain, but also to encourage a critical attitude in the audience. Other anti-illusionary devices included a red moon magically aglow before each appearance of Kragler on stage, while Kragler himself reminds the audience that it is watching actors acting out a reflection of life and not real life itself. (Lawrie) From the standpoint of philosophical thought, Dieckmann presents Brecht as caught between the ideas of Ich-Aufhebung and Ich-Bewahrung, which might be translated as the preservation of the individual will and identity, as opposed to the assimilation of the individual into a larger whole. Unable to see a compromise or harmonious solution to the problems of the individual and the collective identity, "the group is joined together by an interest that is not longer private and directed Griggs: Culture & Critical Categories 15 toward self-preservation, but rather one that extends to the whole of society: the rupturing of the old, egocentric, world." (Dieckmann 13-14) As in the focus on individual identity and subjective reality in the historical periods following the French Revolution, focal points of the twentieth century are the increased awareness of individuality, personal freedom and social responsibility. Where, then does the problem of 'preserving' the individual will vs. the 'assimilation' of identity into the larger whole arise in Brecht's mind? For Brecht, the cult of the individual and capitalism were phenomena to be questioned. Like G. B. Shaw, Brecht was extremely critical of the social consequences of individualism as it developed under capitalism. Although not Marxist from the start, Brecht was obviously driven to his dramatic form by his values just as he was driven to make the 'audience' aware of its participation in the failings of the social system. Collective responsibility is therefore connected to Brecht's idea of the epic theater, which the dramatist explicitly introduced after The Threepenny Opera. Some of the ideas included in the epic theater were the following: • Theater is not real. Spectators should not be encouraged to engage in the suspension of disbelief that is part of the illusionist theater, but should remain aware of the theatrical medium. • Spectators should not identify with or empathize with the characters. • Spectators should not be drawn into the tension of the plot, i.e., should not feel suspense with which they identify. • There should be no Aristotelian catharsis or emotional release at the end of the play. With the above ideas, Brecht did not mean that the audience should not become emotional—quite the contrary. He wanted to irritate and provoke his audience. However, he did not want the emotional energy of the spectator to flow into the character and be satisfied by an ending with closure or resolution. Rather the spectator should come out of the play stirred up, with the desire to carry this energy out into the world in the form of political activism. Some critics have described Brecht's plays as "open ended", but where no solution to the issues presented on stage is offered, the conclusion is nevertheless apparent. For example, after the desperate Shen Te in Der gute Mensch von Sezuan [The Good Person of Szechwan, 1941; produced 1943] Griggs: Culture & Critical Categories 16 beseeches the gods in vain for a solution to how to survive in a capitalist society, the epilogue urges the audience to find a "good ending" to the story, and it is abundantly clear that the only satisfactory resolution to the dramatic conflict lies outside the theatre in revolutionary transformation of society. Brecht's intention to stimulate change beyond the actual performance illustrates his notion of the social function of art. (Lawrie) Thus, the epic theater does not intend to leave the spectator with dramatic closure or a feeling that all is right with the world, but with a feeling of disjuncture or a feeling that something must be set right in the world—the same feeling that Brecht's cultural context and social experiences evoked in him. Modern Chinese Drama in Cultural Context Unlike Western Europe and North America, where the monarchies began to either disappear of lose a significant portion of the influence in the late eighteenth and the nineteenth century, nineteenth century China was ruled by a strong imperial dynasty and, perhaps even more importantly, influenced by a rigid social structure based on the moral, ethical and philosophical teachings of neo-Confucianism. It was not until early in the twentieth century, in 1911, that a revolution brought down the dynasty. However, rather than replacing the dynastic rule with a social and political structure that would respond to a desire for equality or liberal democracy popular in a large segment of the revolutionary movement, the vacuum created by the demise of the dynasty left a chaotic power structure dominated by regional warlords and foreign influences. It was from this chaotic domestic background that China took part in WWII by supporting the allied forces against Germany. However, rather than promoting cultural exchange or intercultural harmony, this cooperation with the West became a primary cause for the Chinese rejection of the West in the twentieth century, as seen in the May Fourth Movement, which immediately followed the signing of the Versailles treaty in 1919. During the negotiation of the treaty, China had demanded that as a reward for its support in the war, the allies return the previously German controlled regions of China. Instead, the Allies gave them to the Japanese. China felt so betrayed by this decision, that the May Fourth Movement, started by students in May 1919, became one of the single most important turning points in the development of twentieth century Chinese culture. Griggs: Culture & Critical Categories 17 Why is this history important to an understanding of Chinese drama? This historical background was as important for Chinese culture and drama as the French Revolution, industrialization, or the developing influence of scientific thinking have been on Western culture and drama. For this reason, in trying to assess foreign theater of the twentieth century, in this case, Chinese spoken drama, one must examine not only historical events, but the ideas that developed in the culture as a result of historical events and the nature of the public sphere with regard to influence on cultural values and attitudes or institutions such as the theater. Explicitly, it must be asked which individuals or institutions influence the form and content of drama, whether on the basis of taste or of cultural doctrine. Only when this framework has been identified can the subtle cultural coding of the plays become intelligible. Important to the study of twentieth century theater are not merely the facts of this past, but the understanding of the dynamic between culture and its artistic institutions, culture and its artists, art and its patrons. Chinese Spoken Drama: A break from tradition One aspect of modern Chinese drama that must be considered at the outset is the difference between Chinese opera, a centuries-old, traditional form of drama still performed today, and Chinese spoken drama, which appeared in early twentieth century after the fall of the imperial dynasty and thereafter dominated twentieth century Chinese theater. Just as religious drama or sacred theater in Western Europe preceded and perhaps paved the way for secular drama and, in the twentieth century, for the desacralized stage, Chinese opera formed the backdrop for the development of the Chinese spoken theater. Chinese opera is usually traced back to the Song Dynasty, that is, to a period between the tenth and twelfth centuries. Performed in various regions and historical periods, the opera went through several stages of development before settling into the forms seen today. Although the Beijing opera (also called Peking opera) is the most well known to the West, there are parallel forms in Shanghai, Guangzhou and other regions. The plots of Chinese opera are generally built on traditional tales, whether historical or legendary, stories known by a broad cross-section of the general public. In terms of spectacle, Chinese opera incorporates music, song, dance, Griggs: Culture & Critical Categories 18 ornate costumes, dramatic make-up, acrobatics, poetry, and other elements of spectacle. In this sense, it is a very stylized form, in some ways comparable to Western ballet, in the elements of dance and fixed gestures or postures, or to Western opera, in the way it incorporates song or storytelling. We can see here a marked distinction between the symbolic, stylized spectacle of the Chinese opera and the Western European fascination with the illusionist stage. In speaking of the differences between traditional Chinese and Western theater, scholar Richard Yang wrote: Perhaps the unique feather of the Chinese opera, in comparison to its Western counterpart, was its imaginative symbolism or its lack of realism. The Chinese have a saying, "nothing on stage is real." Therefore a walk is not a real walk; a cry is not a real cry; a laugh is not a really laugh; and a feast is not a really feast There is no door on the stage, but an actor's gesture can create a door. There is no mountain on the stage, but a table or chair can symbolize a mountain. A whip symbolizes a horse. An oar symbolizes a boat. (Yang, 61) Unlike the similarly stylized opera or ballet in Western culture, which has generally enjoyed a reputation as 'high culture' rather than 'popular culture' (with perhaps the exception of local outdoor performances of opera in Italy), the Chinese opera developed as a popular form of entertainment. In speaking of the reasons for the extreme popularity of the Beijing opera in the nineteenth century, Yang wrote: The Peking opera had only a few simple singing patterns, so simple that almost every person in Peking, whether he was a high government official or a lowly rickshaw coolie, could manage to sing a few of its arias. Its stories were also simple, mostly taken from popular legends or folklore with which the people were already familiar. Its dancing forms and symbolic gestures, though a great puzzlement to first nighters, were actually so conventionalized that they soon could be easily understood and appreciated. (Yang, 61) From this perspective, it becomes clear that the institution of theater in late nineteenth and early twentieth century China was 'popular' theater and 'representative' theater at the same time, influenced by the tastes and interests of a broad public sphere which were influenced by a strong imperial dynasty and neoGriggs: Culture & Critical Categories 19 Confucian thought. It was therefore a reflection of the world experienced by the common people as well as something promoted by the imperial dynasty and therefore a drama also performed for them. It becomes equally clear that the tastes and interests of the theater-going public were very different than those of Western Europe and North America. Aside from the effects of specific historical events or widespread understanding of what theater "is" on methods and styles within theatrical works, the content and form of drama are affected by deep cultural elements of religion or by perceptions regarding the objective and subjective worlds. If, for example, objective reality is subordinate to an underlying reality as is true in some Eastern religions, it may be inquired how this will affect the interest in literal realism on the stage. After the fall of the imperial dynasty in 1911, followed by the simultaneous infusion of foreign influence and rejection of the rigid formalism of Confucianism, much of which was explicitly or implicitly present in traditional Chinese opera, came rise of the Chinese spoken drama. Eliminating music, dance, stylized gesture and costume in favor of a more realistic dramatization in the Western sense of the word, Chinese spoken drama became the dramatic form of experiment in twentieth century China. Chinese Approaches to Modern Chinese Spoken Drama In her book, Reading the Right Text, scholar Xiaomei Chen, attempts to present Western readers with a cultural view of modern theater in China. Her main theoretical considerations, designed to reveal the 'indigenous historical and cultural context' of twentieth century Chinese drama, relate to the following aspects of modern Chinese plays: • tensions between 'artistic form and political content' • aspects of the 'local and global' or 'rural' and 'urban' • political 'representation of the masses' • 'revolutionary memory and pop culture' • 'gender, sexuality and body politics' (Chen, viii) Although overlaps with concerns of twentieth century Western theater are visible here, there is also much that is different, for Chen's categories show little interest in the problem of a scientific theory vs. religious doctrine as the ethical or moral center of culture, little interest in the problems of objective vs. subjective reality or Griggs: Culture & Critical Categories 20 in the problem of language and meaning. Instead, there is a more central focus on politics and social issues, which though also thematically or materially present in Western drama, portray less prominently the plight of the individual (protagonist) and focus instead on the plight or condition of a collective group. Some of this coincides not only with some of the Communist philosophy prevalent in China during the twentieth century, but also with China's character as a generally collectivist culture, compared to the individualistic cultures of North America and much of Central Europe. Chen's discussion of formalist aspects of Chinese spoken drama also makes clear the role of Chinese theater in public discourse, as well as the political nature of the institution. This is not the same as the Western concept of political theater, that is, the discussion of political intent or explicit and implicit political content injected into plays by their authors or directors or ensembles, but the politicizing of the theater by the audience, that is, the search for political implications in the method, style, or theme of a play. Accurate Analysis of Chinese genre The discussion of modern Chinese drama in Chen's book also reveals that apparent similarities in categories of genre may be deceptive, for example in the case of the historical drama. In the nineteenth century, Western drama used historical settings to explore the individual's relationship to history. The historical play may therefore not really be primarily about history but about the concept of the 'individual' in history, the importance of the individual to history or the individual identity within the flow of a larger conceptual field, such as history. That history was being reinterpreted by such plays would certainly have been noted and perhaps discussed in the critique of the play, but most likely only insofar as it revealed theme or was effective in discovering layers of meaning in the work. A good example of contemporary American ambivalence to the truth of history might be perceived in the current practice of creating books or films, based on a true story. This phrase, 'based on a true story,' may mean anything from accurate research and factual representation of details to a vague connection to a real event. The public or the audience is generally unconcerned about the level of truth in the connection and more concerned with the story and its meaning for their lives. As a result of this disregard for or naivete in relation to the problem of historical Griggs: Culture & Critical Categories 21 accuracy, there are rarely large public discussions or critiques held regarding the accuracy of these popular works. In China, however, the reception of historical drama was extremely critical of the historical representation, the meaning of the interpretation of history and the significance of this historical interpretation for the present. The individual characters were important not as heroes or protagonists in the sense of the Western formalist criticism, but in their characteristics as representatives of cultural values and attitudes of the present. This critical perspective would probably most closely connect with what Western scholarship might call the historical critical approach. Furthermore, because the public sphere was controlled first by Confucian formalism, then Maoist idealism and social institutions that regulated the production of art, the idea of symbolic representation had an entirely different value in Chinese drama than it did in Western drama. If plays set in historical periods were sometimes used to disguise a discussion of the present that would be otherwise censored, they were even more often accused of doing so, even where there was no subversive intent. One example of politicized critical reception provided by Chen in her book relates to the Chinese opera Hai Ruis Dismissed from Office: Responding to Mao's call to write about Hai Rui, a legendary official of the Ming Dynasty…Wu Han, the deputy mayor of Beijing and a reputable historian, portrayed an incorruptible Hair Rui dismissed from this official post for having challenged the authority. Wu's Peking opera was absurdly interpreted as having used the drama to challenge Mao's dismissal of General Pen Dehuai, who questioned Mao's radical economic policies of the late 1950s. (Chen, 21) Chen cites multiple examples of where such reception of the theater in the public sphere literally determined the form and content that appeared on the Chinese stage, just as completely as the 'market' value of supply and demand with regard to audience taste has influenced much of what appears on the Western stage. However, despite these differences, there are significant areas of mutual influence and overlapping areas of interests in Western and Chinese drama. Considering the political nature of Chinese theater, it is not surprising that an area where there are explicit cross-currents and also cases of misinterpretation is in the area of political Griggs: Culture & Critical Categories 22 or revolutionary theater as well as in the thematic exploration of social identity and social issues. For this reason, the next section will attempt to show a case study which reveals the complexity of intercultural influence between Chinese and Western theater and also the difficulty of analyzing plays from other cultures without the proper investigation of the culture from which the play has emerged. Cross-cultural Influence and Analysis Postcolonial illusions: Who is appropriating whom? The beginning of Modern Chinese spoken drama is set in 1907 with the production of The Black Slave Cries Out To Heaven, an adaptation of Uncle Tom's Cabin by the Spring Willow Society which consisted of Chinese students who were living in Tokyo just after the turn of the century. Although the ostensible issue in the publishing of the translation of Stowe's novel in China had been the treatment of Chinese unskilled laborers in America (a parallel to the racism exhibited against the black race in the novel), the issue of racial and ethnic conflict was also a Chinese issue within Asia. This was especially true during the War of Resistance against Japan—the period between 1937-1944, during which the Chinese resisted military invasion and occupation by Japan—where ethnicity rather than race is the reason for oppression and persecution. The play was also staged as a class conflict play in Soviet Communist parts of China in 1933—before the War of Resistance with Japan and therefore before racial/ethnic issues were a part of the Chinese theater—with an additional act depicting the rebellion of the black slaves. This play often resulted in agitation and active political behavior among the audience. (Chen, 3) Several things are often assumed in postcolonial interpretations of Asian works: the enforced imposition of Western forms and also the interpretation controlled by the interests and culture of the West. Chen shows by this example, however, that Western ideas were also appropriated by the Chinese, who possessed the knowledge and intent to adapt Western stories and themes to their own purposes. Postcolonial criticism, however, tends to focus on the effects of Western colonization on non-Western cultures and subsequently on the works of art produced in these cultures. In the above case, this critical perspective would limit the richness of the analysis in recognizing the mutual influence of cultural products. Griggs: Culture & Critical Categories 23 Also belying some of the effectiveness of the postcolonial perspective are the instances of borrowing from East to West. One significant example for the epic theater and therefore for twentieth century Western drama stemmed from a visit to Moscow by Bertolt Brecht in 1935, during which the dramatist was exposed to a performance of Chinese opera. In her essay "Brecht, Feminism and Chinese Theatre," drama scholar Carol Martin describes Brecht's perception of Chinese acting and how this experience influenced his concept of alienation with regard to acting styles. In his essay ["Alienation Effects in Chinese Acting" 1964] Brecht articulates a relationship between actor and spectator wherein both become critical observers (not without empathy of the actions the actor performs. Instead of "real life," Brecht saw in Mei's acting a manipulable system of signs and referents. He celebrated the Chinese theatre's ability to manufacture and manipulate Gestus, actions that were both themselves and emblematic, if not symbolic, of larger social practices. (Martin, 77) What Brecht obviously perceived in the stylized gestures, postures and speech of the Chinese opera was a lack of literal realism, that which helps create the spectator's illusion of looking in on 'life' when he or she sees a play. Since this coincided with Brecht's already established interest in a critical distance between spectator and actor, actor and role, he did not bother to investigate the relationship between the actor, the role and the real as perceived by the Chinese actors themselves. Richard Yang's description of the symbolic nature of emotions, actions and objects on the stage of the Chinese opera—where "a walk is not a real walk" or "a cry is not a real cry, where an actor may "create a door" through a gesture, and where "nothing is real"—blends with Brecht's point. However, there is another aspect of realism, one based on Chinese values and attitudes, which Brecht did not take into consideration. Martin cites a quote from actor Mei Lanfang—the actor Brecht observed in Moscow—that illustrates the principle involved: When talking about the conventionalized pantomime of smelling the flower in Drunken Beauty (Guifei zuijiu), Mei Lanfang says: "The important thing is for my heart and my eyes to see that flower (even though there is not one in sight onstage), only that will give the audience a sense of reality." (1999:175-76) (Martin, 79) Griggs: Culture & Critical Categories 24 If we go back to the concept of realism as generally employed in Western literary theory, we can see some room for this view. While literal realism relates to the accurate reproduction of physical reality as we experience it in everyday life—the way a room should look, the way people of a certain social class or education or region will be likely to talk—psychological realism relates to the plausibility of a character's motivation or acts in a certain set of circumstances or within certain relationships. The latter is not necessarily dependent on this behavior occurring within a physically realistic setting. Thus, in the pop-culture film Star Wars, there is an aspect of psychological realism in Luke Skywalker's conflicted love of Darth Vader, even though these characters are placed in an unreal setting of death stars and interstellar travel. In the case of Chinese Drama, we can see a similar type of realism—sometimes called poetic realism—that is more focused on the truth of feelings or metaphysical perceptions than on the truth related to the external world of objects or observable physical behavior. Our perception of realism is based on cultural attitudes and beliefs. This example make evident that dramatists may faithfully adopt styles, methods, techniques or formal patterns without understanding or perhaps caring about the meaning of the element in its original cultural context, and that we cannot judge by appearances when we look at styles, methods or patterns that look the same in a work from another culture. We must investigate the background and context in order to gain an understanding of intended meaning. Apparent similarities and deep-rooted differences One of the plays discussed by Chen in her book and historically significant to modern drama in China is Cao Yu's Thunderstorm, first performed in 1933. The main character of the play is Lu Ma, who as a young servant in the house of Zhou, fell in love with the family's eldest son, Zhou Puyuan and bore him two sons. When Zhou Puyuan married a woman of influential family, Lu Ma was driven from the house with the youngest of her sons and forced to leave the eldest son to be raised in the house of Zhou. Lu Ma subsequently married Lu Gui and bore him a daughter named Sifeng. The time of the play's action is thirty years later. Having left Lu Ma and taken their daughter Sifeng with him, husband Lu Gui has come to work in the Zhou household. Lu Ma comes to the house in search of her daughter, only to discover that Sifeng, has fallen in love with the Zhou Ping, the son that Lu Ma had been Griggs: Culture & Critical Categories 25 forced to leave behind. Because Zhou Ping has been raised as the eldest son of the house and nobody in the house is aware that Sifeng is Lu Ma's daughter, neither of the lovers is aware of the incestuous nature of the their relationship. In another subplot, it is revealed that young Zhou Ping had also been involved in an affair with the woman who is now old Zhou's second wife and that this woman is still in love with her son-in-law. This incestuous and chaotic situation ends in tragedy. Lu Ma's daughter Sifeng and Old Zhou's youngest son are accidentally electrocuted, upon which his eldest son Zhou Ping shoots himself and Old Zhou's second wife, Fangyi, goes mad. Aside from the obvious relationship to the kind of family tragedy evident in Greek plays such as Oedipus Rex, Chen acknowledges Western influence in the structure and unity of the play: "Thunderstorm is a well-structured play in four acts and two scenes…which unfolds and finds resolution within a twenty-four-hour period." (Chen, 8) This observation makes sense in light of the fact that playwright Cao Yu had read all of Ibsen and much Western drama prior to writing this play. In the play's ending, however, Chen discovers a formal similarity between Thunderstorm and a specific European play, which simultaneously reveals a fundamental difference in cultural values and meaning. Like Ibsen's A Doll's House, the play concludes with a lonely patriarch on an empty stage, signifying the emptiness of a broken home, which was, in fact, never a 'home.' However, the two plays differ in a vital respect: where Ibsen's play celebrates Nora's leaving home as a courageous act, Cao Yu's play illustrates that for Chinese women, the lure of leaving home is only a trap. (Chen, 8) Chen's observation is significant to cross-cultural analysis. Hendrik Ibsen's realist play tells the story of Nora, who is married to Torvald Helmer, a bank employee who, after years of hard work and financial struggle, has obtained a stable position with good income. Treated like a charming but immature child by her husband, Nora is portrayed as a compliant and doting wife. We quickly discover, however, that a secret threatens their apparent harmony. Early in their marriage, when Helmer had become seriously ill and they were without financial backing, Nora had forged her father's name to a paper in order to get a loan to enable them to go to Italy for Helmer's convalescence. Saying the money had come from her father, Nora kept this secret, scrimping money from the weekly budget to pay back the loan. Griggs: Culture & Critical Categories 26 It is this secret that creates the tension in the play, for Krogstad, who loaned her the money, not only works under Helmer at the bank, but is in the process of being fired by him. When Krogstad discovers that he is to be dismissed from his position, he threatens to tell Helmer of Nora's duplicity unless she convinces her husband to keep him on at the bank. When she fails to convince Helmer, Krogstad places a letter revealing the fraud in Helmer's mailbox, to which Nora has no key. Helmer reads the letter and reacts by telling Nora that he cannot be married to her. Adding that she is not fit to be the mother of their children, he threatens to take them away from her. In the end, another minor character in the play convinces Krogstad to return the papers documenting Nora's fraud to her. When he does, Helmer, assured that nobody will discover his wife's crime, decides to forgive her; however, Nora now sees her husband in such a way that she will not reconcile with him and ends the play by leaving the house. The validity of Chen's observations regarding similarities between the two plays is obvious. As in Thunderstorm, the tension in A Doll's House arises from a secret threatening to expose a past that will somehow emotionally damage if not destroy the main character. In both plays, the protagonist is rendered helpless by nature of social norms related to gender and power relations—in one case, the relations of a female servant and male master in feudal, pre-Republican China and, in the other, the relations between husband and wife in a patriarchal European society. Also, as in Cao Yu's play, the action of Ibsen's play takes place in a single household. The time frame is slightly longer than allowed by strict Aristotelian unity, covering several days, but the dynamic of the present being overtaken by secrets of the past is the same in both plays. In the comparison of these plays, however, there is an example of two elements appearing similar but having different meaning in their respective cultural contexts. In a modern Western drama, such as Ibsen's, the act of asserting one's will in an attempt to 'determine one's own fate' may end in tragedy, but it will most likely be considered heroic. Ibsen's ending for Nora is open. By leaving the house she has asserted her individuality and her freedom. In a Chinese drama such as Thunderstorm, however, the self-assertion of the individual against the collective is not heroic. Lu Mah left the household but has not been able to escape her fate. Griggs: Culture & Critical Categories 27 When examining works from other cultures, it is not only useful, but often vital to understand the cultural context of the work, as well as the culture-bound characteristics of critical concepts. Works Cited: "Cao Yu's Trilogy: The Wilderness" ChinaCulture.org. c. 2003: Ministry of Culture People's Republic of China. 23 April 2006. http://www.chinaculture.org/gb/en_artqa/2003-09/24/content_38724.htm Chen, Xiaomei. Reading the Right Text. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2003. Dieckmann, Friedrich. "Brecht's Modernity: Notes on a Remote Author." TDR: The Drama Review. 43.4 (1999) 12-15 New York University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. (c) 1999. 16 April 2006. WilsonSelectPlus database. Habermas, Jürgen. Strukturwandel der Öffentlichkeit. Darmstadt: Hermann Luchterhand Verlag, 1979. Higonnet, Margaret. "Authenticity and Art in Trauma Narratives of World War I." Modernism/Modernity 9.1 (2002) 91-107. 15 May 2006. Project Muse. Lawrie, Steven W. "Bertolt Brecht." The Literary Encyclopedia. 17 Dec. 2004. The Literary Dictionary Company. 15 April 2006. <http://www.litencyc.com/php/speople.php?rec=true&UID=554> Martin Carol. "Brecht, Feminism, and Chinese Theater." TDR: The Drama Review. 43.4 (1999) 77-85 New York University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. (c) 1999. 16 April 2006. WilsonSelectPlus database. Molière, The Misanthrope and Other Plays. trans. John Wood. Harmondsworth: Penguin. 1987. Pike, David. "Kaliko-Welt: The Großstädte of Lang's Metropolis and Brecht's Dreigroschenoper." MLN 119.3 (2004) 474-505. 15 May 2006. Project Muse. Wood, John. "Introduction." Beaumarchais, The Barber of Seville and The Marriage of Figaro. trans. John Wood. Baltimore: Penguin. 1964. 11-36 Griggs: Culture & Critical Categories 28 Yang, Richard F. S. "Behind the Bamboo Curtain: What the Communists Did to the Peking Opera." Educational Theatre Journal, Vol. 21, No. 1. (Mar., 1969), pp. 60-66. JSTOR Griggs: Culture & Critical Categories 29