Special Topics in Comparative Literature
Performing Violence: Aspects of Scandinavian and European Drama
Violence, understood as both verbal, psychological and physical acts, has always been a central part of theatre, and forms a strong current in European theatre also in the last hundred years. Reaching from verbal insults to systematic terror and torture, theatrical violence can also be directed towards the audience. The course will discuss different aspects of violence, how it can be understood and what its effects as well as its dramaturgical potential can be. An important dimension will be the ethical problems that violence confronts us with. Against a backdrop of European drama from the 20th century, we will look at different aspects of violence in Scandinavian drama, from Ibsen and Strindberg to contemporary playwrights Norén and Fosse.
Drama
Jon Fosse, TBA
Henrik Ibsen, TBA
Peter Handke, Kaspar, in Plays: 1, 1997, p. 51-141
Elfriede Jelinek, TBA
Sarah Kane, Blasted, 1996
Lars Norén, Blood, tr. Maja Zade, London: Methuen 2003
Harold Pinter, Mountain Language, London: Faber and Faber 1988
Jean-Paul Sartre, Dirty Hands, in No Exit, and Three Other Plays, 1989
August Strindberg, The Dance of Death, in Miss Julie and Other Plays, Oxford World’s Classics 2009
August Strindberg, The Stronger, in Strindberg – Other Sides: Seven Plays, tr. Joe Martin, New York: Peter Lang 1997, p. 309-318
Peter Weiss, Marat/Sade, New York: Continuum 1998
Secondary Literature
Selections from the following titles:
Judith Butler, Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative, 1997
Page duBois, Torture and Truth, 1991
Peter Szondi, Peter Szondi, Theory of the Modern Drama: A Critical Edition, 1987 [1965] Slavoj Zizek, Violence: Six Sideways Reflections, 2008
Beatrice Hansen, Critique of Violence: Between Poststructuralism and Critical Theory, 2000
Lucy Nevitt, Theatre & Violence, New York: Palgrave Macmillan 2013
Christopher Innes, ”Modernism in Drama”, in The Cambridge Companion to Modernism, ed. M. Levenson, 2011, p. 128-154
Jean-Jacques Lecercle, The Violence of Language, 1990
Jeanette R. Malkin, Verbal Violence in Contemporary Drama: From Handke to Shepherd, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1992
Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World, New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press 1985