Literary works cannot be taken over like factories, or literary forms of expression like industrial methods. Realist writing, of which history offers many widely varying examples, is likewise conditioned by the question of how, when and for what class it is made use of.
Interpretation
Literary works are fundamentally different from industrial processes and are influenced by social context and purpose.
Bertolt Brecht emphasizes that literature is not merely a product to be mass-produced but instead is a complex form of expression deeply rooted in the specific historical, social, and political contexts of its creation. The quote underscores the idea that the meaning and impact of realistic writing depend on the audience it serves and the circumstances under which it is produced, challenging the notion of treating literary works like interchangeable industrial goods.
In practice
During a lecture on the importance of social context in literature, one might use this quote to illustrate how socio-economic factors influence literary creation.
The shrill voices of those who give orders Are full of fear like the squeakings of Piglets awaiting the butcher's knife, as their fat arses Sweat with anxiety in their office chairs.... Fear rules not only those who are ruled, but The rulers too.
We need a type of theatre which not only releases the feelings, insights and impulses possible within the particular historical field of human relations in which the action takes place, but employs and encourages those thoughts and feelings which help transform the field itself.
We attacked a foreign people and treated them like rebels. As you know, it's all right to treat barbarians barbarically. It's the desire to be barbaric that makes governments call their enemies barbarians.
War is like love, it always finds a way.
Art is not a mirror held up to reality but a hammer with which to shape it.
Recently my fingers have developed a prejudice against comparatives. They all follow this pattern: a squirrel is smaller than a tree; a bird is more musical than a tree. Each of us is the strongest one in his or her own skin. Characteristics should take off their hats to one another, instead of spitting in each other's faces.
In a successful painting everything is integral - all the parts belong to the whole. If you remove an aspect or element you are removing its wholeness.
It looks like the writer is telling you a story. What the writer is actually doing, however, is using words to evoke a series of micromemories from your own experience that inmix, join, and connect in your mind in an order the writer controls, so that, in effect, you have a sustained memory of something that never happened to you.
The radio makes hideous sounds.
It is not hard to compose, but what is fabulously hard is to leave the superfluous notes under the table.
Being essentially a creator, I never set out to shock, always thinking about creating my work and not about the benefits it could produce.
Piece by piece, I fed my wardrobe to the night wind, and flutteringly, like a loved one’s ashes, the gray scraps were ferried off, to settle here, there, exactly where I would never know, in the dark heart of New York.
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