Showing results for "ralph manheim"

Brecht's famous parable, written in exile in 1939-41, shows that in an unjust society good can only survive by means of evil. In it, the gods come to earth in search of enough good people to justify their existence. They find Shen Teh, a good-hearted but penniless prostitute, and make her a gift that enables her to set up her own business. But her goodness brings ruin and she must disguise herself as a man in order to muster sufficient ruthlessness to survive.Published in Methuen D...

Based on John Gay's eighteenth century Beggar's Opera, The Threepenny Opera, first staged in 1928 at the Theater am Schiffbauerdamm in Berlin, is a vicious satire on the bourgeois capitalist society of the Weimar Republic, but set in a mock-Victorian Soho. It focuses on the feud between Macheaf - an amoral criminal - and his father in law, a racketeer who controls and exploits London's beggars and is intent on having Macheaf hanged. Despite the resistance by Macheaf's fri...

Along with Mother Courage, the character of Galileo is one of Brecht's greatest creations, immensely live, human and complex. Unable to resist his appetite for scientific investigation, Galileo's heretical discoveries about the solar system bring him to the attention of the Inquisition. He is scared into publicly abjuring his theories but, despite his self-contempt, goes on working in private, eventually helping to smuggle his writings out of the country.As an examination of the pro...

This audiobook narrated by Mark Meadows gives an illuminating account of the Great Mother as a primordial image of the human psycheIn this book, renowned analytical psychologist Erich Neumann draws on ritual, mythology, art, and records of dreams and fantasies to examine how the archetype of the Great Mother has been outwardly expressed in many cultures and periods since prehistory. He shows how the feminine has been represented as goddess, monster, gate, pillar, tr...

Described by Brecht as 'a gangster play that would recall certain events familiar to us all', Arturo Ui is a witty and savage satire of the rise of Hitler - recast by Brecht into a small-time Chicago gangster's takeover of the city's greengrocery trade. Using a wide range of parody and pastiche - from Al Capone to Shakespeare's Richard III and Goethe's Faust - Brecht's compelling parable continues to have relevance wherever totalitarianism appears today.W...

This Student Edition of Brecht's satire on the capitalist society of the Weimar Republic features an extensiveintroduction and commentary that includes a plot summary, discussion ofthe context, themes, characters, style and language as well asquestions for further study and notes on words and phrases in the text.It is the perfect edition for students of theatre and literature.Based on John Gay's eighteenth century Beggar's Opera, The Threepen...

Published by Methuen Drama, the collected dramatic works of Bertolt Brecht are presented in the most comprehensive and authoritative editions of Brecht's plays in the English language.This second volume of Brecht's Collected Plays brings together some of his most glittering Berlin successes including The Threepenny Opera, The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny, The Seven Deadly Sins, Man Equals Man and The Elephant Calf. The Thre...

One of the founders of existentialism, the eminent philosopher Karl Jaspers here presents for the general reader an introduction to philosophy. In doing so, he also offers a lucid summary of his own philosophical thought. In Jaspers' view, the source of philosophy is to be found "in wonder, in doubt, in a sense of forsakenness," and the philosophical quest is a process of continual change and self-discovery.—Print ed.

Discover the classic coming-of-age adventure of a young boy and a mysterious book that magically comes to life.When Bastian happens upon an old book called The Neverending Story, he's swept into the magical world of Fantastica--so much that he finds he has actually become a character in the story! And when he realizes that this mysteriously enchanted world is in great danger, he also discovers that he is the one chosen to save it. Can Bastian overcome the ...

A landmark account of the Dionysos myth as an archetypal expression of indestructible lifeNo other god of the Greeks is as widely present in the monuments and ritual practices of antiquity as Dionysos. In this book, acclaimed mythologist and historian of religion Carl Kerényi presents an engaging history of the religion of Dionysos from its beginnings in the Minoan culture to its transition to a cosmic and cosmopolitan religion of late antiquity under the Roman Emp...

Now back in print, this heartbreaking novel by Romain Gary has inspired two movies, including the Netflix feature The Life AheadMomo has been one of the ever-changing ragbag of whores’ children at Madame Rosa’s boarding house in Paris ever since he can remember. But when the check that pays for his keep no longer arrives and as Madame Rosa becomes too ill to climb the stairs to their apartment, he determines to support her any way he can. This sensitive, s...

"My mother has been dead for almost seven weeks: I had better go to work before the need to write about her, which I felt so strongly at her funeral, dies away and I fall back into the dull speechlessness with which I reacted to the nerves of her suicide."So begins Peter Handke's extraordinary confrontation with his mother's death. In a painful and courageous attempt to deal with the almost intolerable horror of her suicide, he sets out to piece together the facts of her life, as h...