Comic Bodies

This course is conceived as an advanced seminar (i.e., upper-level undergraduate and graduate) that addresses in depth the themes developed in the course series Tragic Bodies I and II (CPLS BC 3160 and CPLS GU 4161), but in relation to comic embodiment in drama, narrative fiction, and lyric poetry, with film pairings throughout. As with Tragic Bodies, this seminar explores how dramatic enactment in various forms situates bodily boundaries and edges (including skin, coverings, masking / costume) in and over time, as these are inflected by gender and sexuality as well as race and class. The seminar treats themes in the dramas of Euripides (as a proto-comic dramatist) and especially Aristophanes, the canonical Greek writer of comedy, as shaping central themes and focuses; and it features modern reworkings of and more attenuated engagements with their dramas. The course will also center ground-breaking work on aesthetics, affect and the senses, materialities, and the post-human in order to highlight activist engagements with embodiment.