Metonymic Cohabitation

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

Aesthetics · Art · Closeness · Cohabitation · Impermanence · Linguistics · Literal and figurative language · Literature · Materiality (auditing · Metaphor · Metonymy · Poetry · Sociology · History · Philosophy · Samuel Beckett and Modernism · Theatre and Performance Studies · Visual Culture and Art Theory

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  Katherine Hollander•New German Critique•2018

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