The play as novel: Reappropriating Brecht's Drums in the Night

Abstract

The alienation value of Brecht's early play Drums in the Night has been ignored, dismissed, and co‐opted. By reciprocally engaging Drums in the Night and Bakhtin's theory of the novel, however, we can see its radically dialogic structure, appreciate its alienation value, and reappropriate its prerevolutionary dimensions for contemporary use. We can, moreover, project directions for developing a rhetoric of performed narrative consistent with both Brecht's and Bakhtin's dialogic ideal.