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Spring 2009 Course |
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Makers of Modern Drama 1370 |
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Professor Susan Harris Smith |
"If the world were clear, art would not exist "
Albert Camus
It has been said that the history of modern drama is "the record of attempts to work free from the morass of illusions" and that the best modern plays are instances of "enacted consciousness." Four major western European dramatists - Ibsen, Chekhov, Strindberg and Shaw - writing between 1850 and 1910, the period marking the shift from Romanticism to Modernism, were fully engaged with shattering conventions and setting forth truths. Because one of the objectives was to shake a bourgeois audience from its complacency, the playwrights dramatized the new, the unexpected, the shocking, the revelatory, even the ludicrous.
We will pay special attention to the social, political and philosophical bases of their thought (for instance, Shaw was a Fabian gradualist who wrote "The Revolutionists's Handbook" and Ibsen was strongly shaped by Nietzsche's The Genealogy of Morals). As well, the course explores what "modern" meant at the turn of the nineteenth century, both as a literary phenomenon and as a cultural force for change.
To this end we will study both the significant plays and the influential thought of the period in such texts as: Ibsen's A Doll House, The Wild Duck, and Hedda Gabler, Chekhov's The Three Sisters, The Cherry Orchard, and The Seagull, Strindberg's Miss Julie, A Dream Play, and The Ghost Sonata, Shaw's Candida and Man and Superman; Nietzsche's The Genealogy of Morals, Margaret Fuller's "Woman in the Nineteenth Century," Shaw's The Quintessence of Ibsenism, Max Nordau's Degeneration and Anson Rabinach's The Human Motor.