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Books Like The Good Woman of Setzuan
Best books to read after The Good Woman of Setzuan by Bertolt Brecht
Readers who love The Good Woman of Setzuan by Bertolt Brecht are drawn to its combination of philosophical argument, parable structure, and the central impossibility it dramatizes — that genuine goodness cannot survive in the capitalist system — they want plays and novels that deal with the ethics of action in bad systems, the tradition of the Brecht parable play, and the question of what individuals can do when the system demands that they be bad.
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Mother Courage and Her Children
by Bertolt Brecht
The companion — Mother Courage, the cart, and the Thirty Years War. Companion investigations of the same Brecht question: what does it mean to be good in a bad system? Both plays refuse any comfortable answer, but where Mother Courage shows the consequences of complicity, The Good Woman shows the impossibility of avoiding it
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The Threepenny Opera
by Bertolt Brecht
The earlier companion — Mack the Knife and the analogy between criminality and capitalism. Companion Brecht investigations of the capitalist system: The Threepenny Opera shows the equivalence of criminal and business enterprise from a satirical distance; The Good Woman shows the impossibility of goodness within that system from the inside
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The Caucasian Chalk Circle
by Bertolt Brecht
The companion parable play — Grusha, Azdak, and the chalk circle test. The more hopeful companion to The Good Woman: where Shen Te is driven to double life and the play ends without resolution, The Caucasian Chalk Circle ends with a kind of imperfect justice
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Crime and Punishment
by Fyodor Dostoevsky
The companion investigation of the relationship between principle, necessity, and the actions principle can license — Raskolnikov's theory and his inability to live with its consequences. Both organized around the question of what happens to a principled person who tries to act rightly in a system that does not reward rightness
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The Secret Sharer
by Joseph Conrad
Conrad's companion in the tradition of the literary investigation of the double — the captain and the murderer Leggatt who is his alter ego. Companion investigations of the double as a formal device: both organized around a character who must maintain two identities simultaneously, and the question of which is the 'real' one
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Middlemarch
by George Eliot
Eliot's companion investigation of the relationship between goodness and the world's failure to reward or accommodate it — Dorothea Brooke's 'unhistoric acts.' Companion investigations of the difficulty of being genuinely good in a world organized to reward a different set of qualities
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The Plague
by Albert Camus
Camus's companion investigation of what it means to be good in a situation that makes goodness difficult — Dr. Rieux's work during the plague in Oran. Companion post-war investigations of the ethics of action in a world organized against goodness: Camus's from the Existentialist perspective; Brecht's from the Marxist
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Life of Galileo
by Bertolt Brecht
The companion Brecht play asking when self-preservation becomes complicity — Galileo's recantation. Both Life of Galileo and The Good Woman are organized around the same Brecht question: what does the principled person do when the system demands they compromise their principles to survive?
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