LANGUAGE IN INDIA

Strength for Today and Bright Hope for Tomorrow

Volume 15:6 June 2015
ISSN 1930-2940

Managing Editor: M. S. Thirumalai, Ph.D.
Editors: B. Mallikarjun, Ph.D.
         Sam Mohanlal, Ph.D.
         B. A. Sharada, Ph.D.
         A. R. Fatihi, Ph.D.
         Lakhan Gusain, Ph.D.
         Jennifer Marie Bayer, Ph.D.
         S. M. Ravichandran, Ph.D.
         G. Baskaran, Ph.D.
         L. Ramamoorthy, Ph.D.
         C. Subburaman, Ph.D. (Economics)
         N. Nadaraja Pillai, Ph.D.
Assistant Managing Editor: Swarna Thirumalai, M.A.

HOME PAGE

Click Here for Back Issues of Language in India - From 2001

BOOKS FOR YOU TO READ AND DOWNLOAD FREE!

REFERENCE MATERIALS

BACK ISSUES

  • E-mail your articles and book-length reports in Microsoft Word to languageinindiaUSA@gmail.com.

  • PLEASE READ THE GUIDELINES GIVEN IN HOME PAGE IMMEDIATELY AFTER THE LIST OF CONTENTS.

  • Your articles and book-length reports should be written following the APA, MLA, LSA, or IJDL Stylesheet.

  • The Editorial Board has the right to accept, reject, or suggest modifications to the articles submitted for publication, and to make suitable stylistic adjustments. High quality, academic integrity, ethics and morals are expected from the authors and discussants.

Copyright © 2015
M. S. Thirumalai
Custom Search

Comparison between Shaw’s and Brecht’s
Treatment of Political Consciousness

Sadia Riaz, M.Phil, Rida Sarfraz, M.Phil, and
Farhan Ebadat Yar Khan, Ph.D.

Abstract

The German Bertolt Brecht (1898-1956) and the Englishman George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950) were socially and politically active, innovative, progressive, radical, controversial, and “problem” playwrights who wrote in tradition of political theatre. Most active during the first half of the Twentieth Century, both were revolutionary social critics who shocked their contemporaries with the unpopular activist philosophies of their plays and other writings. Their political philosophies stemmed from the same fount of Marxism.

Brecht adopted communism and Shaw espoused socialism. In their dramatic works, their political consciousness reflects in their dramatic characterization, thematic concerns, and stylistic organization and devices. This paper aims at examining the treatment of political consciousness in these master political playwrights of political consciousness through comparison and analysis of their art of characterization, thematic patterns, and dramaturgical techniques. Interestingly, their characters become their mouth pieces by manifesting their creators’ political conscious through ironic tone or through morally negative consequences of the idealist behaviour of their heroines. Moreover, both cloak their political thematic patterns in dramatic devices which will also come under scrutiny. However, they were different temperamentally which somehow shaped their respective dramatic visions and intentions somewhat differently.

Key words: Bertolt Brecht, George Bernard Shaw, political consciousness in creative writing, comparison.

Introduction

When the playwright can stab people to the heart by showing them the meanness of cruelty of something they did yesterday, and intend to do tomorrow, all the tricks to catch and hold their audience, became the silliest of superfluities… The dramatist knows that as long as he is teaching and saving the audience he is sure of their strained attention as a dentist is or as Angel of Annunciation. -- Bernard Shaw, The Quintessence of Ibsenism

To understand the political dynamics of Brecht’s and Shaw’s plays, an incisive understanding of Karl Marx (1818-1883)’s idea of “[political] consciousness” is vital. In Marx’s view, consciousness is always political, for it is always the outcome of politico-economic circumstances. What one thinks of life, power, and self, for Marx, is always a product of ideological forces. For him, ideologies appear to explain and justify the current distribution of wealth and power in a society. In societies with unequal allocations of wealth and power, ideologies present these inequalities as acceptable, virtuous, inevitable, and so forth. Ideologies thus tend to lead people to accept the status quo. The subordinate people come to believe in their subordination: the peasants to accept the rule of the aristocracy, the factory workers to accept the rule of the owners, consumers the rule of corporations. This belief in one’s own subordination, which comes about through ideology, is, for Marx, in a politically charged sense, becoming “politically conscious” is often meant to connote that people have awakened to their true political role, their actual identity. For Marx, this meant that the working classes would become conscious of themselves as the agents of history--they would unite and share in the wealth of labor. This, for Marx, was their historical role and their right (as opposed to working for wages, fighting wars on behalf of capitalists, and so forth). Significantly, both Brecht and Shaw endeavour to reach out the audience and awaken them from spiritually deadened existences and thus to germinate “political consciousness” in strictest Marxist term.

This is only the beginning part of the article. PLEASE CLICK HERE TO READ THE ENTIRE ARTICLE IN PRINTER-FRIENDLY VERSION.

Sadia Riaz, M.Phil.
sadisehole@gmail.com

Rida Sarfraz M.Phil.
ridasarfraz052@hotmail.com

Lecturers, University of Management and Technology
Lahore, Pakistan

Farhan Ebadat Yar Khan, Ph.D.
Professor of English
Higher Education Department
Government of Punjab, Lahore
dr.farhanebadatyarkhan@gmail.com

Custom Search
  • Click Here to Go to Creative Writing Section

  • Send your articles
    as an attachment
    to your e-mail to
    languageinindiaUSA@gmail.com.
  • Please ensure that your name, academic degrees, institutional affiliation and institutional address, and your e-mail address are all given in the first page of your article. Also include a declaration that your article or work submitted for publication in LANGUAGE IN INDIA is an original work by you and that you have duly acknowledged the work or works of others you used in writing your articles, etc. Remember that by maintaining academic integrity we not only do the right thing but also help the growth, development and recognition of Indian/South Asian scholarship.