In describing Bertolt Brecht’s epic theater, Walter Benjamin describes how the episodes of a Brecht play move in “spurts,” where songs, captions, and lifeless conventions “set one situation from another” and “paralyze [the audience’s] readiness for empathy.” The style, according to Benjamin, seeks to disrupt the Aristotelian unities and present a world-in-progress that requires the audience’s help to finish. Instead of “unalterable” characters who develop linearly, Brecht himself writes, characters are “alterable and able to alter” and they proceed “in curves.” And so, one might argue, the aesthetic of the epic theater presents an appropriate format for the personal development of children and adults alike.
This proposed panel seeks to analyze the way in which the Muppet franchise can be seen to participate in this project of epic theater. So long as they make a connection with Brecht’s epic theater, papers may address any manifestation of the Muppets.
“I hope I shall before long have the pleasure of enrolling you a member of the Anti-saccharine Society, which I have had the happiness to organise, and which is daily extending its numbers. […] I purpose giving a festival, to which I shall invite all that is respectable and intelligent in this part of the country, and in which I intend to demonstrate practically, that a very elegant and luxurious entertainment may be prepared without employing a single particle of that abominable ingredient, and theoretically, that the use of sugar is economically superfluous, physically pernicious, morally atrocious, and politically abominable.”
