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Instructors: Dr. Frank Obenland
Event type:
online: Seminar
Displayed in timetable as:
05.866.313
Hours per week:
2
Language of instruction:
Englisch
Min. | Max. participants:
- | 30
Registration group: AS 313
Requirements / organisational issues:
This is an upper-level seminar in literary studies. It is recommended that students have completed at least one proseminar in literary studies as well as "Written English I" before signing up.
Contents:
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. 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.
Recommended reading list:
Dillon, Elizabeth Maddock. New World Drama: The Performative Commons in the Atlantic World, 1649-1849. Duke University Press, 2014.
Nathans, Heather S. Slavery and Sentiment on the American Stage, 1787 - 1861: Lifting the Veil of Black. Cambridge University Press, 2009.
Richards, Jeffrey H. Drama, Theatre, and Identity in the American New Republic. Cambridge University Press, 2005.
Rebhorn, Matthew. Pioneer Performances: Staging the Frontier. Oxford University Press, 2012.
Digital teaching:
This class will be taught online. This means that assignments for self-study will alternate with live video conferences. Students will also be given group assignments to collaborate on.
Study materials will be made available through the university's Moodle platform. For live digital interactions we will use MS Teams.
Please make sure that you have access to both platforms via your university login (Email, Jogustine, etc.) at the beginning of the semester. A detailed schedule will be made available on the syllabus at the beginning of the semester.
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