Lehrende/r: Dr. Frank Obenland
Veranstaltungsart: Seminar
Anzeige im Stundenplan: 05.866.313
Semesterwochenstunden: 2
Credits: 8,0
Unterrichtssprache: Englisch
Min. | Max. Teilnehmerzahl: - | 30
Anmeldegruppe: AS 313
Prioritätsschema: Senatsrichtlinie Zulassung gemäß Richtlinie über den Zugang zu teilnahmebeschränkten Lehrveranstaltungen vom 07. März 2007. Nähere Informationen hierzu entnehmen Sie bitte www.info.jogustine.uni-mainz.de/senatsrichtlinie
Voraussetzungen / Organisatorisches: It is recommended that you have successfully completed at least one course with a term paper in literary studies before you attend this class. All students will be evaluated according to a term paper written at the end of the semester (Modulprüfung).
Inhalt: In this seminar students will explore how playwrights and audiences conceived the New World in dramatic plays staged around the Atlantic world during the 17th, 18th, and 19th century. Beginning with William Shakespeare's The Tempest, students will learn how plays and dramatic texts served as important conduits for imagining the encounter between Europeans, Africans, and Native Americans in the Americas from the early modern period to the nineteenth century. Students will explore how plays helped not only to popularize common stereotypes about different political, ethnic, and social groups, but also how the stage emerged as an important site for criticizing how African Americans and indigenous people are portrayed in the public sphere. We will read a cross-section of plays from the early national and antebellum periods dealing with the question of how to define an American national identity, westward expansion and Manifest Destiny, as well as nineteenth-century debates on slavery and abolition. In particular, we will look at how a colonial frame of reference is replaced by a nationalist framework for conceptualizing the identity of Americans.
Empfohlene Literatur: Dillon, Elizabeth Maddock. New World Drama: The Performative Commons in the Atlantic World, 1649-1849. Duke UP, 2014. Nathans, Heather S. Slavery and Sentiment on the American Stage, 1787 - 1861. Cambridge UP, 2009. Richards, Jeffrey H. Drama, Theatre, and Identity in the American New Republic. Cambridge UP, 2005. Shaffer, Jason. Performing Patriotism: National Identity in the Colonial and Revolutionary American Theater. U of Pennsylvania P, 2007.
