DRAM 324 - European and American Drama:

Semester Offered: Spring
1 unit(s)

Metatheatre, or “theatricalism,” describes plays that use the means of theater as their primary subject, often through the device of the play-within-the-play or the notion of Theatrum Mundi (“the world stage”/The world as theatre). The theatricalist play can be seen as an alternative structural model to the predominant Aristotelian structure based on plot and character, which became the basis for “Realism.” This seminar will examine various examples of theatricalist plays from different cultures and historical periods, and explore how this mode has existed and evolved throughout history and continues to the present. Early practices of the theatricalist mode can be found in the comedies and tragedies of Shakespeare (Hamlet, A Midsummer Night’s Dream) and in the philosophical plays of the Spanish Golden Age. In seventeenth and eighteenth-century England, the theatricalist mode was most active in the comic form of “theatrical burlesque” (Francis Beaumont, The Duke of Buckingham, Henry Fielding, and Richard Brinsley Sheridan). In late eighteenth to early nineteenth-century Germany, it found a theoretical expression in Romantic Irony (Friedrich Schlegel, Ludwig Tieck, and Christian Dietrich Grabbe). The twentieth century saw numerous different theatricalist manifestations in the plays of Pirandello, Peter Handke, Brecht, Tom Stoppard, Friedrich Dürrenmatt, and Jean Genet, and in the performances of The Wooster Group and Mabou Mines, among others. Mr. Byongsok Chon.

Prerequisite: DRAM 221/DRAM 222.

One 2-hour period.