Course No: 350:548
Index #: 12039
Distribution Requirement: A3
Tuesday - 10:20 a.m.
MU 207

C18 Drama: Staging Character
Sean Silver

 

The concept of “character” stitches together a series of binaries or near-opposites.  Character is one’s public reputation, but also their personal integrity; it names a superficial stamp or an intrinsic quality.  Character is a part one merely plays or one’s true self, things that appear to the eye or those which must be won through analysis.  Closer to home, a character means literature's minimal token (a letter on the page) and its most memorable, most elusive entity (a pseudo-person, a character on stage).  Indeed, a cynic like me might think that literature's pseudo-persons emerge, as if by accident, from the right disposition of letters, but for many authors, the writing process begins with its people: the letters only come later.

Focusing on the century which was the crucible of private individualism and of modern publicness, of the self and society, we will ask how “character” absorbed and coordinated a complex constellation of meanings.  This is the century of the "golden age" of British drama; it is also the century of the rise of the novel, and, in an important sense, it is the century which saw "character" pioneered in the earlier genre but developed in the later.  Each week’s readings will be organized around one novel or stage-play—but usually a play—particularly associated with a memorable pseudo-person.  Some of these texts bear the name of the characters for whom they are remembered, like Cato and Robinson Crusoe.  Others don't, like The Beggar's Opera, or The Way of the World

Students will choose from a menu of possible projects, from which to cobble together an end-of-semester portfolio.  Prominent among these options will be one or more brief presentations (which, for the purposes of this seminar, let’s call character references), a media reconstruction of a single performance of a play, a study and presentation on a single contemporary source (like Collier's Short View, Cibber's Apology), or a short (6-8pp) or longer (12-15pp) essay incorporating course insights into a reading of one or more texts. 

Possible authors might include: Etherege, Otway, Wycherley, Dryden, Behn, Addison, Farquhar, Centlivre, Lillo, Gay, Fielding, Dodsley, Haywood, Steele, Sheridan, Walpole, Goldsmith, Inchbald, Shelley, Jerrold, Bulwer-Lytton, Boucicault.  Secondary readings will be drawn from contemporary authors, influential essayists, and recent characters of the critical stamp.

Modern criticism will be drawn eclectically from historically inflected performance theory, network- and actor-network theory, new materialisms, and historical studies of the British stage.  Possible characters from modern criticism: Nancy Armstrong, David Brewer, Frances Ferguson, Lisa Freeman, Margo Finn, John Frow, Catherine Gallagher, Aaron Kunin, Deidre Lynch, D.A. Miller, Sandra Macpherson, Blakey Vermeule, Alex Woloch, Rita Felski, Toril Moi, and others.