Commitment and Protest in Bertolt Brecht’s Mother Courage and Her Children (1939) and Yacine Kateb’s L’homme aux sandales de caoutchouc (1970).

Abstract

This research paper studied Bertolt Brecht's Mother Courage and Her Children (1939) and Kateb Yacine’s L'homme aux scandal de caoutchouc (1970). Our major interest in this dissertation was to look for possible convergences between the German playwright, Bertolt Brecht and the Algerian Kateb Yacine as committed writers. Therefore, we have borrowed some notions from Sartre’s theory of ‘Committed Literature’ developed in his book What is Literature? (1948) and we relied on Brecht’s theory of ‘Epic Theatre’. We have demonstrated that the two authors share the same stand towards the role of literature during the twentieth century, a period that is characterized by great economic and political unrest. We have divided our work into two Chapters. The first one is a thematic analysis in which we attempted to highlight how Bertolt Brecht and Kateb Yacine, as Sartrian authors, denounce war, imperialism and social injustice. The second chapter explores the different techniques of ‘Epic Theatre’ that the two authors rely on in the two selected plays to make of their respective theatre a means of protest and social change.