ENG 429 SLC 429/598

THEATER AND POLITICS IN MODERN EUROPE

fall semester

 

Ionesco 

 

Syllabus

Recommended Reading List

This course offers a comparative cultural perspective on the political, social, ethical and aesthetic problems tackled in contemporary West- and East-European drama. By exploring the collective biography of modern Europe – a multicultural, ethnically and nationally diverse space by definition – and on the developing nations of Central and Eastern Europe before and after the 1989 fall of the Berlin wall, this course examines the conflicting global issues that have changed the face of Europe over the past century to the present, providing them with key strategies of survival and personal/national/transnational identity configuration that are relevant for understanding today’s dialogical interplay between national goals and global concerns. In particular, this course explores the intertextual web of references that connects plays produced by authors of diverse cultural, ethnic and national backgrounds, lodging the cultural decipherment and interpretative approaches to the dramatic corpus under analysis in a trans-disciplinary, global perspective on antagonistic concepts such as conflict/harmony, nationalism/universalism, materialism/humanism.