CLT 368 - The Play of Ideas - Visions of Violence

Luc Gilleman

W 7:30-9:30 p.m.

Screening Th 7:30-9:30 p.m

The Play of Ideas is an advanced drama-cum-theory course suited for students with a more than basic grounding in literary studies and an interest in philosophical /theoretical matters. The Play of Ideas: Visions of Violence studies how drama not just illustrates philosophic notions but puts them actively into play, enriching them and generating others through poetic or concretely physical renditions. The topic of the course is violence, studied through a selection of European plays, written by important playwrights few students have encountered in their studies: Michelle Fabien, Hélène Cixous, Fernando Arrabal, Peter Handke, Stanislawa Przybyszewska, the Marquis de Sade, Georg Büchner and others. The first section of the course links violence to the idea of the Viscous, the fluidity that threatens reason, resulting in madness and destruction. The dominant symbol here is the eye, a smooth, vulnerable surface reminiscent of the flimsy world of appearances, precariously containing the slimy matter that erupts so dramatically in Oedipus Rex and King Lear. A number of unsettlingly scatological texts by French philosopher and essayist George Bataille and movie excerpts from, among others, Un chien andalou, will enhance our awareness of the emotional and conceptual power of these images. Other sections of the course develop this idea further, naming it in different ways: the eruption of chaos in revolutions, the unnamable acts that hide under the label Holocaust, and the jouissance posited by poststructuralist readers of the signifier. Our voyage finally returns to its starting point, Oedipus Rex, ending with two feminist rewritings that recast its concerns in conceptually suggestive ways. This course may count towards the major in French studies, Comparative Literature, and English.



Text and Film Used in Previous Years:

1. The Eye of the Storm: Violence and Tragedy

Plays:

Sophocles Oedipus Rex
Shakespeare, King Lear

Context:

Plato, from Republic
Aristotle, from Poetics
Nietzsche, from The Birth of Tragedy
Goldmann, from The Hidden God
Miller, "Tragedy and the Common Man"
George Bataille, from Visons of Excess

Film material:

Julie Taymor/Stravinsky: Oedipus Rex
Tyrone Guthrie/Yeats, Oedipus Rex
Grigory Kozintsev/Pasternak: Korol Lir
Peter Brook: King Lear
Laurence Olivier, King Lear
Luis Buñuel/Dali, Un chien Andalou



2. French Revolution: Violence and the Body

Plays:

Georg Buchner, Danton's Death
Stanislawa Przybyszewska, The Danton Case
Peter Weiss, Marat/Sade
Marquis de Sade, from Philosophy in the Boudoir

Context:

Stanislava Przybyszewska, from A Life of Solitude: Correspondence
Simone de Beauvoir, "Must We Burn Sade?"
Susan Sontag, "The Pornographic Imagination."

Film Material:

Andrzej Wajda: Danton
Peter Brook: Marat/Sade
Pasolini: Salo
Philip Kaufman: Quills

3. The Holocaust: Violence and Ethics

Plays:

Max Frisch, Biedermann and the Firebugs
Peter Weiss, The Investigation
Charlotte Delbo, Who Will Carry the Word?

Context:

Adorno, "Meditations on Metaphysics: After Auschwitz"


Film Material:

Leslie Woodhead: Holocaust on Trial
Claude Lanzmann: Shoah


4. Ideology: Violence and Politics

Plays:

Dario Fo, Mistero Buffo
Peter Handke, Kaspar
Vaclav Havel, The Memorandum
Fernando Arrabal, The Architect and the Emperor of Assyria

Context:

Vaclav Havel, "Dear Olga."
George Orwell, "The Principles of Newspeak"
Herbert Marcuse, "The Closing of the Universe of Discourse," from One-Dimensional Man.
Antonin Artaud, from The Theatre and Its Double
Jean-Jacques Lebel, "On the Necessity of Violence"

Film material:

Filippo Piscopo: A Nobel for Two: A Documentary on Dario Fo and Franca Rame
Daniel Sargent Moore: The Artists' Revolution
Eastern Europe: Breaking With the Past, part 2: Vaclav Havel



5. Rereading/Rewriting Oedipus: Violence and Gender

Plays:

Michelle Fabien, Jocasta
Helen Cixous, The Name of Oedipus

Context:

Barbara Freedman, "Frame-Up: Feminism, Psychoanalysis, Theatre"

Film material:

Hélène Cixous (Interviewed by Jonathan Rée)