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Metonymic Cohabitation: on Women Fgures in Brecht
Author(s) -
Swales Martin,
Swales Erika
Publication year - 2000
Publication title -
german life and letters
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.1
H-Index - 12
eISSN - 1468-0483
pISSN - 0016-8777
DOI - 10.1111/1468-0483.00173
Subject(s) - metonymy , cohabitation , closeness , literal and figurative language , poetry , materiality (auditing) , aesthetics , impermanence , art , metaphor , literature , sociology , linguistics , philosophy , history , mathematical analysis , mathematics , archaeology , theology , buddhism
This paper begins by registering the paradox that, although Bertolt Brecht was in his lifetime frequently exploitative of women (both erotically and, in terms of his creative work, collaboratively), his poetic and dramatic oeuvre is wonderfully res‐onant in its picturing of women figures. A number of concerns within that portrait‐ure are highlighted: the perception of women’s closeness to the material universe as such; their intimacy with everyday things and objects. Yet neither cognitively nor aesthetically was Brecht a crude determinist. For him, materiality was not all. Hence he allows his women figures to exist in a kind of metonymic cohabitation with physicality. And by that token they speak for and can be spoken for by things. Precisely this field of force which allows literal and figurative modes to interact is at the heart of Brecht’s creative project – to acknowledge and interrogate the forms and sites of human being in the world.