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Spring, 2007

ENGL 466
Theory of Modern Drama 
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Professor: Julia Walker
TR 12:30 PM - 01:45 PM 
259 English Bldg 
CRNs: 46816 (G section 4 credits), 46814 (UG section 3 credits)

What makes Modern Drama “modern”?  What did modern thinkers think?  Curiously, they looked back to the drama of Ancient Greece, using it as a standard against which to measure the distance and compare the differences between it and the drama of their own time.  While some moderns faulted modern drama for its failure to adhere to the classical model, others viewed it as an evolutionary triumph, while still others sought an objective perspective from which to analyze modern drama in relation to the modern age.  In this course, we will survey the theories of modern drama that were both born in and came to define the period of modernity.  Beginning with Friedrich Nietzsche and Richard Wagner, the first unit will consider the relationship between language and music, text and performance, exploring also the work of the Cambridge anthropologists and the debate waged by William Archer and T. S. Eliot.  Our second unit will focus on the psychologization of character, examining two landmark essays—Georg Lukacs’s “The Sociology of Modern Drama” and George Bernard Shaw’s “The Quintessence of Ibsenism”—in conjunction with the writings of modern acting theorists such as Francois Delsarte and Konstantin Stanislavsky.  The third and final unit of the course will explore the relationship between social and aesthetic form, engaging the famous Brecht-Lukacs debate as well as Walter Benjamin’s thesis on the German Trauerspiel.  With every unit, representative plays will be read, discussed and, where possible, viewed in performance (e.g., on film).