COML 3735 - Puppetry: Comic, Dramatic, and Political

(crosslisted)
(also PMA 3735) (LA-AS)

Spring. 4 credits.

B. Maxwell.

Puppetry is eminently suited to cross-cultural, cross-generic comparative aesthetic study. Puppetry also might well be the most frequently used metaphor in characterizations of hierarchical political life and its operatives, “democratic” or authoritarian. At the same time, puppetry as practice, not metaphor, has been an immense, long standing, and perennially effective vehicle of political protest. Additionally, the links between puppets, dreaming, and surrealism will occupy us. Throughout the course, we will attend to aesthetic and political theories that can increase understanding of puppetry, and in some cases might be illumined by it (to imagine one example: a puppet theatre debate between puppet feminists, puppet Marxists, and puppet deconstructionists, refereed by a puppet homeless person).