Tragic Histories from Early Modernity to the Postcolonial Present

Catalog description

Why is history so often written as tragedy? Can dramatic and literary structures help us understand the past? Does the genre of tragedy offer a uniquely helpful framework for considering religious violence, revolutions, and political tumult? And if we are really living in history-as-tragedy, what kind of ending can we expect? This course will investigate these questions using premodern, early modern, and postcolonial sources. Beginning with recent writers who have used the structures of tragedy to study postcolonial history, we then move on to early modernity, a period that was stubbornly interested in the connections, collisions, and conflicts between tragic drama and the narration of history. As we will see, despite the enduring early modern afterlife of Aristotle's claim that history deals in particulars while dramatic poetry deals in universals, early modern historians and poets exerted significant influence on each other. Playwrights in England and Europe routinely lifted their subject matter from medieval and classical history, while many historians and political writers looked to the narrative structures and figures of tragedy to make sense of political and religious change. By focusing on early modernity but exploring interdisciplinary, transnational, and transhistorical thematic connections, we will look to pursue the same kinds of comparative thinking that students employ in their various concentrations. Readings may include plays by William Shakespeare, Pierre Corneille, Miguel Cervantes, John Milton, and Wole Soyinka; and a variety of transnational theoretical and historical writing.