Theatre and Science in the Age of Evolut

From Nietzsche’s proclamation of the death of God to the horror of the trenches, the turn of the twentieth century appears as a moment when the status of the human needed total reconsideration. Such philosophical and cultural anxieties make their way on stage provocatively in this period. This course dives deeply into the vast, diverse, and complex theatre cultures of London and New York in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, framing it in light of the period’s deep tensions about the human condition propelled by the publication of The Origin of Species in 1859. We will read theatre textually, materially, and in conversation with scientific discourses of the time, covering a range of social, political, biopolitical, and existentialist questions.