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 us anything useful in making sense of colonial violence, revolutions, empire, and conquest? 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, taking as its centerpieces William Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra and Derek Walcott's A Branch of the Blue Nile, a tale of Shakespearean staging in Trinidad. Along the way we will explore modern and early modern dramatists, historians, and theorists who have used the structure of dramatic tragedy (and its concerns with passion, lamentation, causality, reciprocity, and reversal) to understand history. By thinking across early modernity and 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, Derek Walcott, Pierre Corneille, and Wole Soyinka; and a variety of transnational theoretical and historical writing.