1. Historicism What is historicism (and historiography)?
How is a hermeneutic approach to a text historicist?
How do historicist assumptions influence our reading of ancient drama?

2. Norms: Edgar and Sedgwick
Two basic orientations
Applications to individuals and groups
Context-based
Vehicles of power and ideology

3. Norms: Orientations
We can think of norms in sociological and political terms (Edgar and Sedgwick).
Our aim is to think about applications to literature and other arts.

4. Literary Norms: Genre What would constitute a norm in literature?
What are the normative limits of some genres that you know? (e.g., norm in the context of the sonnet?)
How are genres in fact dependent upon some norm-based pattern of thinking?
Can we ascribe value to genre-based norms?

5. Norms: Other Arts
How might norms function in other, non-literary arts?
Do you understand the arts to be a developmental process by which norms arise, are challenged, and displaced (paradigm)?
What are the dangers or weaknesses in a developmental argument?

13. Music Line chant Polyphony (e.g. Lobo)
Sonata-allegro form (e.g. Mozart)
Chromaticism/tempo “problems” (e.g. Satie)
Twelve-tone music (e.g. Berg)

14. Film Continuity editing Violation of continuity editing
shot reverse shot
180-degree rule
Violation of continuity editing

15. 180-degree rule

16. Origin of Literary Norms
Where do the forms to which we apply normative thinking come from?
Intrinsic to form vs. socially relative
Other responses

17. Changes in Dramatic Conception
Aristotle writes a more or less prescriptive (i.e. normative) poetics.
Aristotelian poetics were given an even stronger normative content (while also challenged) during the French Baroque (Corneille).
Hegel’s Lectures on Fine Art developed an historical view of the arts from an ostensibly meta-historical perspective.

18. Quotation on Hegel
“Hegel retold the history of art in terms of changing relations between spiritual content (idea) and sensuous medium: in symbolic art, characterized by Egyptian and Indian art, the medium dominates the idea; in classical art, from ancient Greece, idea and medium are in perfect balance; in romantic art, from Christian art onward, the idea reaches its ascendancy, manifesting ‘infinite subjectivity.’ Hegel proposed a hierarchy of individual arts, from architecture to poetry, and suggested, somewhat obscurely, that the capacity for further development had been exhausted (the ‘death of art’).”

19. Modern Re-workings Gustav Freytag’s Technique of the Drama (1868)
Georg Lukacs, Theory of the Novel (1915)
Peter Szondi’s Theory of the Modern Drama (1965)

21. Review of Freytag
Action, character, and dramatic structure radiate from the idea (conceptual center)
The viability of the idea in its presentation depends upon the playwright’s artistry.
Choice of material (like in Aristotle) is important, but we live in a self-consciously historical age (not a mythic one).

22. The Idea The idea and the Idea
The latter concerns larger patterns of causality, necessity, and historicity.
The Idea is part of global history.
These ways of thinking derive from Hegel.

23. Aristotle and Freytag
Freytag differs from Aristotle in that he has a greater interest in the psychology of characters.
Freytag emphasizes the cultural and temporal specificity of probability.
“The dramatic ideas and actions of the Greeks lacked a rational conformity to the laws of nature, that is, such a connecting of events as would be perfectly accounted for by the disposition and one-sidedness of the characters. We have become free men, we recognize no fate on the stage but such as proceeds from the nature of the hero himself” (90).

25. Against Normativism
Szondi attacks the idea that form dominates content to the degree that subject matter must conform to pre-established formal patterns.
Such notions are intrinsically unhistorical, and therefore suspicious.
History is a question of subject, but subject is ultimately subservient to a (non-epic) dramatic universalism of form.
passages: 3

26. Hegel’s Shift
Hegel attempts to undermine distinctions of form and content dialectically; the result is that formal distinctions (genres) themselves become historical rather than ahistorically universal.
Results?: rejection, re-universalization, re-adjustment to historicist limits
And?: Crisis is meaningful and demands interpretation outside of universal normative judgments

27. Rejecting Normativity
What stands in the way of a normative poetics in the sense of Szondi’s objectives?
passage: “we will have to do without a systematic, that is, a normative, poetics...because a historical-dialectical view of form and content eliminates the possibility of a systematic poetics as such” (5).

28. Origins/Rationale for the Drama
The Drama is a formal designation which can be applied to much of the theatrical literature between the Renaissance and the mid-to-late nineteenth century.
The Drama entails a certain understanding of time, character, and action and problems like motivation, spectatorship, and dialogue.
passage: 7

29. Questions to Attend to What is a worldview?
What distinguishes the medieval from the modern worldview, at least in terms of the arts?
What causes the transition from one to the other?
What seems to be the role of the “self” in the emerging worldview of modernity?
Can you think of a basis of life in which the self is not primary? What other bases are there?

30. Characterizing the Drama
What traits does the Drama have?
Consider for a moment how plays before the Drama (e.g. Greek drama or medieval drama) do not conform to these criteria.
Consider also how the plays by Ibsen or Strindberg (or Beckett since you have also read him) also stand outside.
passages: 8, 9

31. General Defining Points
The Drama is
self-enclosed (absolute)
primary, not a representation
always present and subject to causation
a temporally and spatially parallel universe
excludes certain elements and types (e.g. history plays)

32. Questions Arise
Why are the prologue (protasis), chorus, epilogue, and monologue rejected by the Drama?
What is the relation of authorship (or textuality) to the Drama?
What is the relation of spectator to the Drama?

33. Closing Paragraph
The key terms are (interpersonal) dialectic, sublation, and dialogue.
Understanding this formulation is important since it helps us position some of our plays in relation to each other, namely, helping us to understand why Antigone is not Dramatic, why The Misanthrope is (despite non-Dramatic techniques), why The Wild Duck is problematic, and finally why Ohio Impromptu is not.

34. Primacy of Dialogue
Why does Szondi claim that “the Drama is possible only when dialogue is possible” (10)?

35. Dialectic and Disintegration
In the latter part of the nineteenth century the Drama begins to disintegrate due to crises in a previously unquestioned form (Szondi’s five playwrights).
Freytag’s normative technique cannot explain the dynamism of a truly dialectical understanding of the theater, despite Freytag’s fundamental Hegelianism.
Szondi contends that all normative critiques of formal structure are necessarily limited historically.

36. Exceptions
The popular stage has continued to produce so-called well-wrought plays and continues to do so today in “plays” (often musicals) like those by commercially-motivated figures such as Andrew Lloyd Weber.
The biggest changes came in the avant-garde theater.

37. Szondi’s Big Five Henrik Ibsen (Norwegian) Anton Chekhov (Russian)
August Strindberg (Swede)
Maurice Maeterlinck (Belgian)
Gerhardt Hauptmann (German)
What makes Szondi’s five playwrights transitional?

40. Remarks on Ibsen
Function of exposition (Greek myth) and the tendency to “epic effects”
This is the novelistic aspect of Ibsen (16)
How then does Szondi read Sophocles’ Oedipus and Ibsen’s efforts differently?

41. For Next Time
Read: Shaw, Major Barbara, Acts I-II