[CW-Grad] Oscar Wilde, spring grad seminar, CWPA 281 -- description

[Robin Russin]

CWPA 281:  Oscar Wilde and Late Victorian Theatre

Spring 2011

Thursdays, 2:10 – 5:00, ARTS 214

Professor Richard Hornby

Office: INTN 2022

(951) 827-3976

rhornby68 at aol.com

                                                                    Description

Although he wrote only a single true masterpiece, The Importance of Being Earnest, Oscar Wilde was a fascinating literary figure.  Because he was a socialist, feminist (he actually edited a women’'s magazine), Irish Nationalist, aesthete, and homosexual, he is a lens through which we can study most of the important aspects of late Victorian theatre and Victorian society generally.  This will be a valuable course for students of theatre, literature, history, philosophy, sociology, or gay studies.

In the 1890s, Oscar Wilde became a fabulously successful playwright, with four straight hits running on London's West End, the equivalent of Broadway.  His career was destroyed after three sensational trials in which he was convicted of homo sexual practices and sent to prison.  His harsh treatment there destroyed his health, leading to his early death in 1900 at age 46.  Today, we are more likely to be horrified by the hypocrisy of late Victorian society, and its detestable abuse of a great writer, than we are about Wilde's sexual orientation.  

We will read several of Wilde's plays, including Earnest, plus his novella, The Picture of Dorian Gray.  We will read other important playwrights of the period, including Ibsen and Shaw, and study the theatrical conditions of the time.  There will also be lectures and readings on late Victorian political, intellectu al, and social history (with special emphasis on attitudes toward sexuality), as well as on artistic movements such as the impres sionists, the aesthetes, the decadents, and the symbolists.  In this regard, we will read some of Wilde's critical writings, which are related to all these groups, and are important for their influence on all subsequent aesthetic theory.

Open to graduate students, and undergraduates by consent of the instructor.  With this course, undergraduate theatre majors can receive credit for four hours of the literature, history, and criticism requirement.