Tui (intellectual)

A Tui is an intellectual who sells his or her abilities and opinions as a commodity in the marketplace or who uses them to support the dominant ideology of an oppressive society. The German modernist theatre practitioner Bertolt Brecht invented the term and used it in a range of critical and creative projects, including the material that he developed in the mid-1930s for his so-called Tui-Novel—an unfinished satire on intellectuals in the German Empire and Weimar Republic—and his epic comedy from the early 1950s, Turandot or the Whitewashers' Congress. The word is a neologism that results from the acronym of a word play on "intellectual" ("Tellekt-Ual-In").[1] Brecht routinely referred to the members of the Frankfurt School, particularly Theodor Adorno, as "Tuis."[2] The corresponding term "Tuism" describes the theory and practice of the Tui-intellectual.[3]

References

  1. ^ Kuhn and Constantine (2004, xix, 251).
  2. ^ Jay (1996, 201-202).
  3. ^ Leming (2005, 43-45).

Sources

  • Jay, Martin. 1996. The Dialectical Imagination: A History of the Frankfurt School and the Institute of Social Research, 1923-1950. Weimar & Now: German Cultural Criticism ser. New ed. London: U of California P. ISBN 0520204239.
  • Kuhn, Tom and David Constantine, eds. 2004. Collected Plays: Eight. By Bertolt Brecht. Bertolt Brecht: Plays, Poetry, Prose Ser. London: Methuen. ISBN 0413773523.
  • Leming, Warren. 2005. "Tui Tsunami: Brecht Reception and Homeland Insecurity." Communications from the International Brecht Society 34 (June): 43-45.