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Mid-twentieth-century American drama is often read as a theatre of pressure: private lives staged as public conflict, everyday spaces turned into battlegrounds, and familiar ideals tested against social change. In the decades surrounding World War II, playwrights developed new forms of psychological realism and intensified stage symbolism to explore questions of identity, desire, status, truth, guilt, and the price of self-invention. These plays frequently circle around the gap between appearance and reality, the force of memory, the violence of social norms, and the fragile narratives people build to make life bearable. This course introduces students to central aspects of mid-20th-century American drama through close readings of four canonical plays. We will analyse how dramatic form creates meaning (setting, dialogue, silence, rhythm, stage directions), how recurring motifs and symbols work across texts (light, music, objects, the home, alcohol, illness, names, performance), and how these works engage with broader cultural contexts such as class mobility, societal roles, sexuality, mental health, and the promises and failures of the American Dream. Alongside detailed textual analysis, we will compare the plays’ shared concerns and their distinct theatrical strategies—from poetic realism to confrontation-driven psychological theatre. Primary texts: A Streetcar Named Desire (Tennessee Williams, 1947) Death of a Salesman (Arthur Miller, 1949) Long Day’s Journey into Night (Eugene O’Neill, 1956) Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (Edward Albee, 1962)
There will also be a research session to help students prepare class presentations and term papers, i.e. a practical toolkit for academic research and analysis. @Lehramt students: There is a Reclam school edition of most texts and the plays are also suitable for schools, which makes this course particularly relevant to Lehramt students. |
