PMA 6700 - [Melodrama, Modernism, and Modernity]

(crosslisted) AMST 6300, ENGL 6310, FGSS 6300

Not offered 2015-2016. 4 credits. Letter grades only.

N. Salvato.

This course examines the history of melodrama and the various theories, often sharply divergent, that have developed about and around it. Along with the practitioners and critics of melodrama, we ask: Should melodrama be understood as a specific genre, a set of related genres, or as a mode of expression (typically characterized as excessive) that crosses media and periods? Why might melodrama be distinctively modern, and how ought we to define modernity? Is there a pre-modern or early modern melodrama? At the same time that we seek answers to these questions, we will trouble the commonly held assumption that melodrama is incompatible with literary and theatrical modernism(s) and will rather identify the complex ways in which modernist and melodramatic expressions are imbricated with and implicated by each other. Key authors may include playwrights Euripides, Pixerecourt, Colman, Aiken, Shaw, Artaud, Brecht, Stein, Williams, Shepard, and Ludlam; novelists Dickens, Balzac, and James; and theorists Bentley, Booth, Brooks, Elsaesser, Lowe, Singer, and Williams. (HTC)