Beckett and Modern Drama (Part 1) - Detailseite

This two-part course intends to provide an introduction to Beckett’s dramatic oeuvre and to contextualise its experimental engagement with the basic medial, formal and generic constituents of drama and theatre within the historical developments of drama since the end of the 19^th century. The two seminars are supposed to complement each other and establish connections across different aesthetics and languages. In the first we will be looking at what characterizes modern drama via a selection of European plays that can be considered both crucial for the history of the genre and as major points of reference for Beckett himself. Starting with the new kind of realist/naturalist subject matter and subjectivity and the way these are expressed in the spatial economy and structure of Ibsen’s plays, we will go on to look at the Irish context via Synge’s and possibly Yeats’s symbolist approaches and end with the existentialist movement and drama of the absurd in Genet and possibly Ionesco. Parallel to that, the second seminar will deal with the particular deconstruction of the various parameters of theatrical communication and dramatic logic that Beckett’s plays perform. We will start with his most famous post-war plays such as Endgame and Happy Days and the way they serio-comically suspend and challenge the production of meaning. But we will also be looking at the later shorter plays and their aesthetics of exhausting the various medial parameters of theatre by not only undermining notions of plot and consistent characters, but by focusing, for example, on the anthropological, philosophical and political implications of voice (Not I), its haunting mediality (Krapp’s Last Tape) or its interrelation with theatrical time and space (Footfalls).