Download DRA 402. 01 Syllabus - Western Languages and Literatures

DRA 402: MODERN DRAMA [Spring 2015]
Instructor: ASLI TEKINAY
Office: TB 425
The objective of this course is to introduce students to the drama genre
and to do a survey of modern European and American drama within the
context of various dramatic movements and schools.
Class policy:
 Attendance to class is required. Students are expected to attend at
least 75% of the total number of classes. Students who fail to do so
cannot take the final exam.
 There will be one midterm, one reaction paper and one final exam. The
midterm and the reaction essay account for 60%, the final for 40% of
the course grade. Students have to maintain an average higher than
45 in order to be admitted to the final exam.
 Students are expected to come to class having read the assigned
material for the day.
Textbook:
The textbook for the course is compiled by the instructor. It is available at
YUNUS COPY.
Texts:
*”A Doll’s House” (H. Ibsen)
*”Uncle Vanya” (A. Chekhov)
*”Miss Julie” (A. Strindberg)
*”Hairy Ape” (E. O’Neill)
*”All My Sons” (A. Miller)
*”A Streetcar Named Desire” (T. Williams)
MIDTERM EXAM : April 14, 2015
[Structure: A two-part exam.
Part 1 is composed of questions related to the background material.
Part 2 is composed of quotation questions from the plays studied in
class.]
*”Amedee” (E. Ionesco)
*”The Collection” (H. Pinter)
*”The Two Executioners” (F. Arrabal)
*”Professor Taranne” (A. Adamov)
*”What the Butler Saw” (J. Orton): this is a self-study text, ie. outside
reading for which you are responsible in the final exam.
REACTION ESSAY WRITTEN IN CLASS:
Due date: May 12, 2015
[Samuel Beckett’s “Waiting for Godot”.]
FINAL EXAM
Essay type.
MODERN DRAMA
“Modern drama is realistic” (? !)
Realistic is a slippery term in dramatic criticism. In 1909, after
the best of the realistic plays had been written, Edward Gordon
Craig wrote about turn-of-the-century actors and acting methods
in On the Art of the Theatre. Chronologically progressing, he
wrote about Edmund Kean – known as a ‘natural’ actor, who was
surpassed in being natural by Macready who seemed artificial
when Henry Irving arrived. In time, Antoine made Irving look
artificial, and in turn Antoine’s acting became mere artifice by
the side of the acting of Stanislavsky. “What then”, asked Craig,
“does it mean to be natural?” And he answers: “I find them one
and all to be mere examples of a new artificiality – the
artificiality of naturalism”.
As it is with acting, so it is with playwriting: the old gives way to
the new, which in turn grows old. Each generation feels that its
theatre is in some ways more real than the last: Euripides over
Sophocles, Moliere over commedia dellárte, Goldsmith over
Steele, Ibsen over Schiller, Brecht over Ibsen… It is, of course,
the conception of reality which changes, and realism must finally
be evaluated, not by the style of a play or a performance, but by
the image of truth its audience perceives.
The age of Ibsen, Strindberg and Chekhov thought of itself as
realistic in the style and content of its plays but from our
distance, it is possible to see it as merely another convention.
This is to say, realism is a relative concept. YET, it is still possible
to isolate a characteristic realism that held the late 19th c. stage
and to claim that was the beginning of modern drama. This
beginning coincided with the scientific revolution which
undermined the intellectual optimism of the early years of the
century.
August Comte’s early scientific view of the society (1824:
Systeme de Philosophie Positive) / Charles Darwin’s biological
theory of natural selection (1859: The Origin of Species) / Karl
Marx’s idea of the economic man (1867: Das Kapital)
together reflect the revolution.
The parallel literary movement in France – represented by such
naturalistic novelists as Balzac, Flaubert and Zola) –
accordingly encouraged the emergence of a different kind of play
and a different kind of performance to match it. The new play
and its mode of production were in conscious rebellion against the
characteristically romantic form of drama popular at the time.
19th century Romantic Drama:
Romantic movement was particularly associated with political
dissent and unrest after the French Revolution and it exulted a
new-found freedom of spirit and boldly challenged established
values.
In Germany, the drama of Sturm und Drang in Goethe and
Schiller hosted a drama of plays of passionate nationalism which
glorified figures of heroic proportions.
Romantic ideal for drama was given in a famous manifesto of
1827: Victor Hugo’s Preface to Cromwell. In elaborate terms,
Hugo scorned the neo-classical laws of dramatic unity: The only
laws should be those of nature. Taking Shakespeare as its model,
the stage should claim its natural freedom of time and place, and
allow the sublime and the grotesque, tragedy and comedy, to meet
and mingle in life.
In 1830, these new principles were applied by Hugo at the
Theatre Francaise in his romantic historical melodrama in verse,
‘Hernani’. This event is the most important event in 19th c.
dramatic history. The production caused a riot, a battle to be
finally won by Hugo. Although his play was far from representing
real life on stage, it opened the way for the coming of modern
realism.
Romantic theatre: sensational drama of strong emotions and
moral sentiment. Its extensions are domestic drama and
melodrama.
Formula: goodness, virtue X villany, evil (social injustice, wealth
and power)……………………………….moral temptation and torment
In the process, the audience suffers.
Comforting knowledge: Providence will eventually intervene and
virtue will triumph.
Led by Eugene Scribe and Victorien Sardou, romantic drama in
Paris drew upon this popular formula. Under their hands, the
French style of play acquired the apt name of ‘la piece bien
faite’, ‘the well-made play’ and the term eventually became
synonymous with any mechanical writing which placed too much
emphasis on an efficient plot and a satisfying box office.
The REALISTIC REBELLION, when it came, seemed to many
people unpleasant, consciously shocking. In general, the realist of
this time was in rebellion against romantic situations and
characterization, and tried to put on the stage only what he could
verify by observing ordinary life. In the 19th century, this meant
middle-class life. The dramatic dialogue avoided poetic flights
and excessive sentiment; instead, it corresponded to the genuine,
plain language spoken in real life.
Like ‘realistic’, ‘naturalistic’ is also a critical term which is
slippery but it’s applied more specifically to the so-called
naturalistic movement. The scientific naturalist tried to show
that powerful forces governed human lives, forces of which we
might not be fully aware and over which we might have little
control – the forces of heredity and environment. These plays
bore witness to the instinctive behaviour of men and women and
the characters and their situations seemed representative of
their class or age group, sex or economic group, with the
consequent loss of that essential individuality we know to be
characteristic of life.
THEORY of NATURALISM:
It was the novelist Emile Zola (1840-1902) who first outlined a
theory of naturalism in literature. He regarded his novels, some
of which he later turned into plays, as clinical laboratories in
which he might scientifically explore the consequences upon his
characters of their birth and background. Inevitably his
creatures appeared to be the victims of society, and all his
conclusions seemed pessimistic.
Zola wrote challenging theoretical prefaces to his plays and the
preface to ‘Therese Raquin’ is among the most famous of them:
(1867) widely regarded as the first milestone of the movement.
(Story: grim tale of sexual passion in a lower middle-class setting.
Therese’s adulterous love, the murder by drowning of her sickly
husband, and her subsequent guilt and final suicide in a pact with
her lover, Laurent.)The play exemplified Zola’s recurrent theme:
the pressure of character and the past on the events but it was
hardly the realistic slice of life he aimed at. Zola’s stated
philosophy, both of novel and drama, was one of absolute
objectivity, with setting, characterization and dialogue rendered
so close to actual life that an audience would be convinced by the
illusion of its reality. Zola’s target was the established French
theatre of the romantic drama; now it was time for the theatre
to strip the theatre of falseness – of
content/playwriting/performance – and artificiality.
Zola recognized that the language of the play was the key to
change. His essential requirement was that the theatre should
not lie; he claimed that he was the honest soldier of truth. We
may now smile at the notion that literature could ever become a
science because fiction can never prove anything; but the
experimental approach of naturalism could strongly inform the
creative imagination and provide a vital new impulse for art. Zola
believed that art and literature should serve the inquiring mind,
investigating, analyzing and reporting on man and society, seeking
the facts and the logic behind human life. The new drama would
not be deficient in poetry either, because truth would encourage
the poetry of humanity. So, Zola awaited the arrival of a genius, a
true innovator who would change a stage soaked with the ‘gray
rain of stale mediocrity’ and speed the rebirth of the theatre.
This innovator was to be IBSEN, who – as it happened – greatly
disliked being compared with Zola: “Zola descends into the sewer
to bathe in it; I to cleanse it.”
MODERNISM
ART - artist (painter, writer, sculptor…)
-
medium
-
recipient (viewer, reader, spectator…)
Beginning of the 20th c: art was expected to conform to the conventions
of realism. Then came modernist works (The Wasteland (1922), Ulysses
(1922), Picasso’s paintings, Jean Cocteau’s films…) Pleasure? x Pain,
Satisfaction? X Irritation.
Yet, Eliot, Joyce, Picasso became giants of 20th c culture.
Modernism is the expression of a chaotic, complex, fast-moving,
changeable world in place of the familiar world of the Victorian
certainties and comfortable Edwardian optimism. In terms of form,
previous forms which attempted to provide answers and neat solutions
were rejected and replaced by more open and less certain forms.
Periodization of modernism: 1900-1940
End of WWII: a profound change toward experimental writing. Young
writers attempted to shake off the modernist legacy. Drama was a
latecomer. Innovation in form began to be felt in the mid-1950s
(Beckett and the absurd).
Modernist Theatre:
Little has been written on modernism in theatre in comparison to poetry
and fiction. Also, there is no consensus on the use of terminology and
periodization: modern or modernist?
Let’s first look at the origins of innovative theatre in Europe in the
late 19th century:
Modernist theatre has its origins in the revolutions in theatrical
practice centered in Paris in the 1880s. Two strong trends were
created at this time: symbolism (“Theatre de l’Oeuvre” (1893) est. by
Lugne-Poe) and naturalism (“Theatre Libre”(1897) est. by Andre
Antoine).
Symbolism in theatre was led by Maurice Maeterlinck (1862-1949)
who rejected previous theatrical concentration on the surface of life
and instead attempted to create dramas of internal action and
psychological power. Penetrating beyond the material, the observable
and the rational, it used suggestion and ambiguity to represent multiple
levels of reality. Symbolist plays are often lyrical and dream-like.
Naturalism was introduced by Emile Zola, whose “Preface to Therese
Raquin “(1873) serves as a manifesto of the movement. Zola wanted to
abolish all existing conventions in the theatre and create plays that
were an exact fragment of life rather than a fancy or an escape from
life. Zola urged a change in the conventions of acting, more
verisimilitude in scenery and staging, and costumes that suited the
character rather than flattering the actor.
Though radically different from each other, symbolism and naturalism
are manifestations of modernism in theatre. We should underline that
modernism in drama and theatre involves a range of different but
related issues. On a very basic level, as expounded by Zola in the 1880s,
it was a matter of eliminating constraints, dismantling what Zola calls
the decayed scaffoldings of the drama of yesterday and making way for
an extension of both theme and subject matter into new and previously
forbidden areas. In a profounder sense the real well-spring of
modernism is a radically altered Weltanschauung born of a loss of such
values and beliefs as the rationality, purposefulness and dignity of the
human condition.