Classical Drama

3 Credits · Level: Graduate, Undergraduate

For German literary writers and philosophers of the eighteenth century, theater and drama were especially attractive as they offered opportunities to reflect on social questions, to educate the public, and to experiment creatively with literary form. In particular, the genre of the bürgerliches Trauerspiel allowed authors, performers, and audience members to reflect on the changing relationship of individuals to the family and society. These works foregrounded female sexuality and its role in upholding new regimes of gender and sentimentality/sensibility. The long eighteenth century also saw innovations in historical drama and verse drama as well as significant contributions by women as authors, actors, and theater entrepreneurs. In the absence of political unity, the theater and theatrical genres provided space to imagine what a German “nation” might look like, with far-reaching consequences. This graduate seminar will engage in a threefold examination of drama in the long eighteenth century: as a site of theoretical inquiry, as a field of literary praxis and as a mode of theatrical performance. Through analyses of texts from the early Enlightenment to the so-called Classical period, the seminar will address the following questions: Why does drama hold such pride of place in eighteenth-century German aesthetics (and in accounts of eighteenth-century German literary history)? How do eighteenth-century intellectuals think through the relationship between dramatic form and the social world? How do ideas about ‘nation’ and ‘Germanness’ figure into this discussion? Finally, how do eighteenth-century dramas generate, critique, and transform notions of gender, sexuality, marriage, family, class, and race?