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Towards a Productive Aesthetics. Contemporary and Historical Interventions in Blake and Brecht

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Published Dec 2021

Keith O’Regan

Author: Keith O’Regan
In Towards a Productive Aesthetics: Contemporary and Historical Interventions in Blake and Brecht, Keith O’Regan mobilises a constellative approach to compare the political-aesthetic strategies of William Blake (1757-1827) and Bertolt Brecht (1898-1956). O’Regan traces two similar trajectories in each author’s work: an exploration of how capitalist domination defines conjunctures, and an investigation of how historical figures, themes and terrains illustrate past failures or losses that can be cleaved open for radical possibilities in the present. Brecht and Blake posit an “oppositional aesthetics of the now” that articulates a theory of experience under capitalism, while counter-posing an oppositional form of existence.

Biographical Note

Keith O’Regan, PhD (2017), teaches in the Writing and Humanities Departments of York University. His recent publications centre on comparative analyses of historical and contemporary film, and writing and graduate education.

Readership

The audience is broadly academic, and of interest to readers of art and aesthetics, cultural and literary studies, philosophy and to a broader readership interested in political/radical aesthetics.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments

1 Introduction

2 Brecht and the Now
1 Mann ist Mann: The Right Question and the Precision of Time
2 The Knowing Johanna
3 Kuhle Wampe and the Good Answer
4 Concluding Brecht to 1933

3 Blake, Opposition, and the Now
1 Blake and Romanticism
2 Expect Poison, Demand Movement
3 Innocence’s Opposition to Experience
4 Conclusion: The Future in the Present

4 Brecht, History and the Productive Past
1 And the Cart Rolls On … Mutter Courage and Learning from Those Who Don’t
2 The Religion of the Now: Galileo and the Knowing Science
3 The Chalk Lines of History: Der Kaukasische Kreidekreis, Productivity and the Past
4 Concluding the Historical Brecht

5 Blake, Milton, and Historical Redemption
1 Blake Contra Newton
2 The Importance of What Is Missing
3 Filling in That Which Is Missing
4 Milton’s Entrance
5 Blake Labouring in History
6 Brecht, Blake and the Uses of History

6 Conclusion

Bibliography
Index