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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.