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), and an international faculty member at SISU in Shanghai (School of English Studies). He has published several books on Interculturality and Literature, as well as volumes on American studies (Discourses of Exception, Exclusion, Exchange) and on Cross-cultural Representations of Honor Cultures and Face Cultures. Michael Steppat was formerly a Professor at Arizona State University and the University of Texas (Austin), and he is a research fellow at the John Kluge Center of the Library of Congress (Washington DC).
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