Drama 365C - Theatre Culture Studies III: Melodrama to Modernism

Institution:

Washington University in St Louis

Subject:

Description:

The third of three historical survey courses in theater and performance studies, this course traces the origins of the modern theater. Beginning with Romanticism's self-conscious break with the past, we study the rise of bourgeois melodrama with its intensely emotional rendering of character and spectacular visual effects. We consider how those effects were made possible by advances in industrial stage technology that reproduced the everyday world with unprecedented realism, and how playwrights responded to those technologies by calling for the theater to become either a "total work of art" that plunged its spectators into a mythical realm, or a petri dish that analytically presented the struggles of the modern individual within his or her modern milieu. Exploring a range of aesthetic modes (including melodrama, Realism, Naturalism, Aestheticism, Symbolism, Expressionism, the Epic theater, and the Theatre of the Absurd), we read classic plays by modern playwrights such as Ibsen, Chekhov, Shaw, Pirandello, Brecht, and Beckett to consider how the modern theater helped its audiences understand as well as adapt to the rapidly changing conditions of modernity.

Credits:

3.00

Credit Hours:

Prerequisites:

Corequisites:

Exclusions:

Level:

Instructional Type:

Lecture

Notes:

Additional Information:

Historical Version(s):

Institution Website:

www.wustl.edu

Phone Number:

(314) 935-5000

Regional Accreditation:

North Central Association of Colleges and Schools

Calendar System:

Semester

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