350:656

Index # - 13315

Distribution Requirement:  A5

Thursday – 1:10 p.m.

MU 207

Elin Diamond

Postmodern Drama and Performance

This seminar will investigate the rich record of dramatic postmodernism, beginning with Beckett (b. 1906) and Genet (b. 1919). Each represents pivotal trends in dramatic modernism, the former a poetics of spareness and negation, the latter an exorbitant ritualized transgressiveness. Along with individual plays (Kennedy, Churchill, Kane and others) we'll investigate performance genealogies and cultural theories (Jameson, Irigaray, Foucault, Roach, Foster) relevant to the making and reception of postmodern drama. We'll explore the strengths and weaknesses of a performance studies approach, both in the theater and in extra-theatrical sites. How do ethnography, ritual investigations, happenings, racial and gender struggle come together in the 1960s and 1970s to generate contemporary notions of performance, and what are the consequences for dramatic form? "Postmodernism" like "performance" is a contested term.  In our seminar we'll understand it in a periodizing as well as in an aesthetic sense, locating the effects of global changes after WWII—decolonization, the redistribution of labor, and the shift in the West from manufacturing and nation-based markets toward image-saturated transnational “flows.” Throughout the term, our texts and theorists will help us track a newly self-conscious performance of history and memory, of racial and sexual "others," and the possibilities of, as Hal Foster puts it, a "postmodernism of resistance."

Requirements: regular 1-page response papers, an oral presentation with annotated bibliography, a short paper and a seminar paper.