This lecture is devoted to a very influential development in drama, which expresses vital American experiences in culture. After tracing key aspects of the growth of the genre, the topics will be:
The growth of American drama;
Eugene O’Neill, The Iceman Cometh;
Arthur Miller, Death of a Salesman;
Tennessee Williams, A Streetcar Named Desire;
Edward Albee, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?;
Dramatizing the “American Dream”.
This genre has produced some of the world’s most important playwrights, who have won Nobel Prizes and Pulitzer Prizes. Maybe as a certain parallel with China, drama in the modern sense hardly existed in America before the 20th century, quite unlike the genre of the novel. These major works acutely and precisely diagnose the conditions under which American Dreams get transformed into something rather different, leading to distortion and deception. Our task will be to analyze this process.
Michael Steppat
Michael Steppat is Professor of Literature in English at the University of Bayreuth (Germany), emeritus, and an international faculty member at SISU. After gaining his Ph.D. and his “Habilitation” he became a Fulbright professor at the University of Texas, then research professor at Arizona State University. As academic Dean of his Faculty for 12 years, Steppat devised an M.A. program in Intercultural Anglophone Studies. He is an elected project director in the national Excellence Strategy. His published books include Honor Face and Violence: Cross-Cultural Representations of Honor Cultures and Face Cultures; Literature and Interculturality (3 volumes); Historical Intersections of Intercultural Studies (2 volumes); Discourses of Exception, Exclusion, Exchange (in American studies).
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