COML7041 - Melodramatic Tactics

Early melodrama was deliberately experimental, even avant-garde: combining poetry, dance, and scenic effects to produce a new affective theatre of suspense. It presents a rare case study for theorists of genre, a form with clear origins and initial paths of dissemination. Audiences encountering it for the first time on German, Parisian, and London stages found in it an astonishing hyper-realism that we now associate with immersive theater: set to expressive music and featuring a host of visual, sonic, and olfactory effects. Today, melodrama is arguably even more pervasive than two centuries ago. (How “melodrama” became “melodramatic” will be one of the questions lurking behind our readings and discussions).

Our seminar will begin in its first week with the performance poetry of Jean-Jacques Rousseau and the groundbreaking stage designs of Jacques Phillipe de Loutherbourg, who in plays like Harlequin Robinson Crusoe (1781) and Omai, or A Voyage around the World (1785) created the first truly three-dimensional sets through which actors had to move. These sets were as arresting as they were global and exotic. Early in the course, therefore, we'll move from Europe to the Caribbean, reading works such as Inkle and Yarlco (1787), Columbus, or a World Discovered (1793), and the pantomimic (1800) and melodramatic (1830) versions of Obi, or Three-Finger'd Jack. Alongside these plays, we'll read selections from Benjamin Mosely's Treatise on Sugar (1799) and C.L.R. James's The Black Jacobins (1938). Around week five we'll then move into melodrama proper, reading foundational plays like Thomas Holcroft's A Tale of Mystery (1802) and Isaac Pocock's The Miller and His Men (1813). Born during a cease-fire and exploding into popularity during thirteen years of world war, English melodrama came to dominate British and American stages by 1815. We'll also sample other cultural forms, particularly Gothic fiction and poetry of the supernatural, asking how these new aesthetic forms shape emotional response, particularly as they traverse media.

In our final weeks, the course will become a true seminar, with its members determining our final readings. Whether we move forward, backward, or laterally will be up to you. My hope is that our final meetings might see us moving into the medieval and the futuristic, the local and the diasporic.

This course is open to all Ph.D and M.A. students. Submatriculants should contact me to request permission, as well as submitting a permit request via Path@Penn. Course work will be comprised of a few responses, a presentation, and a conference paper that may be expanded into a longer work. If possible, we'll also hold a session on digital tools and archival methods. I'm also working to bring in a few guest discussion leaders if possible, including our own Jacob Myers.