2018-2019

The interactions between a dramatic text and its actual and potential performance-realizations in a specific artistic medium serve one of the fundamental points of departure for “Theatre and Performance Studies” (TAPS). This seminar will explore the dynamic relations between ‘text’, ‘medium’ and ‘performance’, exemplifying with some of Shakespeare’s key plays, in particular emphasizing his treatment of the magic of art/theatre, the appearance of supernatural figures, political power and social violence. The dramaturgical perspective for ‘staging’ these themes (on the stage, as theatre and opera; on the screen; or by radical textual adaptation etc.) theorizes the artistic practices of each particular medium (its ‘language’ or constitutive features) and the application of these practices for performing Shakespeare. The aim of this course is to examine and analyse existing realizations of some of Shakespeare’s key dramas in a broad range of media as well as to investigate the possibilities for making them meaningful today, through dramaturgical analysis in the class. By providing the tools for a self-reflective dramaturgical process where academic research methodologies, philosophical thinking, and artistic creativity are combined these investigations we will strive to integrate such a dramaturgical process in academic as well as artistic contexts.

This seminar focuses on American contemporary playwrights who have made a significant impact with regard to dramatic form in the past 20 years. Playwrights will include, Tracy Letts, Annie Baker, Lynn Nottage, Quiara Alegria Hudes, Ayad Akhtar, and Amy Herzog. Textual analysis is consistently oriented towards staging, design, and cultural relevancies. Work for the course will include research papers, presentations, and scene work. (Drama)

Fiction has always provided rich source material for drama. But much 20th and 21st century fiction can seem unadaptable—it is often sprawling, poetic, interior, fragmentary, or cerebral (or all of the above!). This hands-on course will challenge students to approach modern and contemporary literature with unconventional tools of staging, editing, and design. Students will also be introduced to the work of contemporary theater companies and productions that have taken on seemingly impossible adaptation projects, and closely study adaptations of Jorge Luis Borges, Franz Kafka, Virginia Woolf and others.

This course is an orientation and practicum in contemporary dramaturgy. After surveying Enlightenment treatises that occasioned Western dramaturgical practices, students will critically engage present-day writings that consider the objectives and ultimate raisons d’être for the production dramaturg. Students then undertake dramaturgical research, exploring different methodologies and creative mind-sets for four representative performance genres: period plays; new plays; operas or musicals; and installations or performance art. Special attention will be given to cultivating skills for providing constructive feedback and practicing dramaturgy as an artistic collaborator and fellow creator. The class culminates in the design and compilation of a sourcebook for actors, directors, and designers, followed by a dramaturgical presentation intended for a professional rehearsal room.

This course investigates the individual experience of immigration: how do immigrants recreate themselves in this alien world in which they seem to lose part of themselves? How do they find their voice and make a place for themselves in their adoptive homes? If in the new world the immigrant becomes a new person, what meanings are still carried in traditional values and culture? How do they remember their origins and record new experiences?

What do comics add to the discourse on health, illness, and disease? What insight do comics provide about the experience of illness? Can comics improve health? Graphic Medicine: Concepts and Practice is a course designed to introduce students to the basic concepts and practices of the emerging field of graphic medicine. Broadly defined as the “intersection between the medium of comics and the discourse of healthcare,” graphic medicine allows for a unique exploration of health, disease, and illness through the narrative use of graphic and textual elements. Following a life-cycle framework, this course will examine the range of graphic medicine works that address topics such as pregnancy, abortion, mental health, sexuality, chronic medical diseases, HIV/AIDS, dementia, and end-of-life issues. Students will learn about conceptual and practical aspects of the field and be exposed to a variety of styles and genres that capture its breadth and diversity. In addition to reading, analyzing, and discussing the works, an important component of the class will be exercises during which students will create their own graphic medicine works. Taught by a nurse cartoonist (also a founding figure in the field) and a physician, the course also provides a perspective of the field from within the practice of medicine. Through didactics, discussion, and practice, this course will provide students with a thorough understanding of the field of graphic medicine.

This course will introduce students to advanced trauma theory and survey classics in the field, focusing on relevant psychoanalytic and social scientific theoretical works from Freud onward through critical social theory related to holocausts, genocides, illness, accident, sexual violence, and torture. Special attention will be given to the relation of the "historic" scenes of obliteration to modes of negativity in everyday life. While most primary texts will come from the U.S., theoretical and historical works will derive their arguments from a variety of geopolitical scenes. Some focus on graphic novels about trauma will also help focus the questions of mediation in the course.

The joke gets at a disorienting truth: we live in a world where cyberspace increasingly leaks into the “real” physical space of our lives, and the two often become surrealistically conflated. We can be at once in a given geographical location and “online,” wafting in and out of presence in both places. We live in a world where major events transpire nowhere but “on the Internet,” from hacks to business transactions to relationships. These events have effects and consequences that are felt in our physical world as well. How do we tell – and read – stories that take place at least in part in virtual regions? In this course, we will investigate narrative depictions of experience that transpires in the not-quite-place of cyberspace and similar technologically-sustained virtual arenas. Earlier dream narratives anticipate this world where experience increasingly takes place online; in later narratives of virtual reality, technologically-enabled virtual landscapes confer a dreamlike (il)logic on daily experience. What can we make of the apparent rapprochement between scientific and magical paradigms here? What are the political stakes of a virtual world sometimes portrayed as anestheticizing but also sometimes a space where otherwise unavailable experiences and information can be accessed? We will examine a transatlantic range of influential twentieth-century texts as well as selections from theoretical and critical texts on communicative and information technology.

This course uses the theories and methods of the field of visual culture to investigate a range of modern and contemporary novels that make use of visual media. Examining books by André Breton, Kurt Vonnegut, W.S. Sebald, Kathy Acker, Ishmael Reed, and Barbara Browning, among others, we will ask: How do pictures help tell stories? What kinds of relationships between practices of looking and reading are established by intermedial novels? What are the effects of different kinds of visual media in the context of the novel? What are the different ways printed images have been situated in relation to the narrative sequence or temporal movement of the novel? What relation to the world beyond the pages of the novel do such images stage? What is the status of textual description in these works? Texts by Michel Foucault, wjtm, Roland Barthes, and Johanna Drucker will introduce key concepts and point to relevant critical discussions. Students who take this course will learn how to analyze different kinds of visual signs alongside verbal ones, how to correctly deploy technical vocabulary developed by literary critics and theorists of visual culture, and how to build a critical argument around visual and verbal interpretation.

Magic realism depicts our own world as a place of fantastic possibility, where ordinary people nonchalantly negotiate spells, transformations, and superhuman abilities. We will read a range of fantastic fiction from Joyce and Woolf to Rushdie and Pynchon. Why does the fantastic emerge especially in narratives that deal with the politically marginalized and the colonized? What are the (sometimes real-world!) consequences of these flights of fancy? (Fiction, 1830-1940)