The Making of Modern Theatre: Ibsen and Chekhov
A study of the originality and influences of Ibsen and Chekhov, the first semester begins with an analysis of melodrama as the dominant form of popular drama in the Industrial Age. This analysis provides the basis for an appreciation of Ibsen, who took the complacent excitements of melodrama and transformed them into theatrical explosions that undermined every unquestioned piety of middle-class life. The effect on Strindberg leads to a new way of constructing theatrical experience. The second semester focuses on Chekhov, who in retuning theatrical language to the pitches and figures of music, challenges conventional ideas of plot. Finally, Brecht, Lorca, and Beckett introduce questions about the very sensations delivered by drama, plumbing its validity and intent.
Open to any interested student.
Literature courses
- Abbreviated Wisdom: How the Short Story Works
- Acting Up: Theatre and Theatricality in 18th-Century England
- African American Literature: Constructing Racial Selves and Others
- After Eve: Medieval Women
- Declarations of Independence: American Literary Masterworks
- Dostoevsky and the Age of Positivism
- Eight American Poets
- 18th-Century Women of Letters
- Empire of Letters: Mapping the Arts and the World in the Age of Johnson
- Epic Vision and Tradition from the Odyssey to Walcott's Omeros
- First-Year Studies: Amid the Tears and Laughter: The Political Art of Ancient Greek Tragedy and Comedy
- First-Year Studies: Autobiography in Literature: Self/Life/Writing
- First-Year Studies: Calles y Plaza Antigua: The Country and the City in Literature and Film
- First Year Studies in History and Literature: The Two World Wars of the Twentieth Century
- First-Year Studies in Literature
- First-Year Studies: Japanese Literature: Ancient Myths to Contemporary Fiction
- First-Year Studies: Modern Myths of Paris
- First-Year Studies: The Three Crowns of Florence: Dante, Petrarch, Boccaccio and the Beginnings of Modern
- Green Romanticisms
- Literary London
- Lorca’s World: From Granada to New York, Literature in Translation
- Modernism and Fiction
- New Media Literacies
- “New” World Literatures: Fictions of the Yard
- New World Studies: Maroons, Rebels, and Pirates of the Caribbean
- Romantic Poetry and Its Consequences
- Seventeenth-Century English Literature: Tradition and Transformation
- Sex in the Machine
- Small Circle of Friends: A Topic in Renaissance Literature
- Studies in the 19th-Century Novel
- The Forms and Logic of Comedy
- The Greco-Roman World: Its Origins, Crises, Turning Points, and Final Transformations
- The Making of Modern Theatre: Ibsen and Chekhov
- The Nonfiction Essay: Writing the Literature of Fact, Journalism, and Beyond
- The Poetics and Politics of Translation
- The Poetry Book: Text and Design
- Typology of the Narrator
- Warriors, Rogues, and Women in Breeches: Adventurous Lives in Early Modern Transatlantic Literature: Literature in Translation
Vera Wang '71 addresses Class of 2013; photos, videos, media clips available on Commencement site