Papers by Matthew Moore
Office hours: M 9-11 and by appointment Course Description This is a class about how to read play... more Office hours: M 9-11 and by appointment Course Description This is a class about how to read plays. We will explore different ways of engaging with dramatic texts, approaching them as: literary objects that function through language and theme, worlds moving before us in time and space, blueprints for eventual performance, documents of historical tenison and debate, sequences of action and event, modes of thinking through complex problems, and systems of performed signification that call us to the collective act of meaning making. As theatre makers will ask how the choices being made by a playwright: create narrative, action, and world; establish an audience's relationship to and experience of the action/event/world; reflect and interact with the cultural and socio-historical circumstances of the writing; and suggest approaches to creating the physical life of production. And more broadly: How do different cultural contexts and geo-historical moments differently make use of dramatic structure? How do the worlds modeled in plays suggest criticism of (or change in) the society that views them? Who is the work for and whose positions in the imagined/real world does the play challenge, stabilize, or question? How does the play, as a semiotic, semantic and phenomenal system, create meaning? Readings will include theoretical frameworks for analyzing dramatic texts, primary works of dramatic theory, about 8 plays, critical introductions, and historical background materials. We aim to survey a diversity of time periods, cultural traditions, dramatic forms, and voices, but our focus is on analytic habits of mind, not content coverage or theatre history. We will begin by reading a series of one acts that will allow us to spend adequate time on each text. Later in the semester we will move to full length plays. This is a writing intensive class. We will engage in multiple forms of writing across the semester including: individual exercises in applying analytic techniques, reflections on dramatic meaning, concept statements rooted in textual analysis, and performance criticism. In every aspect of the class, we will endeavor to cultivate communication (verbal and written) about meaning, interpretation, visualization, and our own ways of interacting with the material. This ability is fundamental to the collaborative process of making theatre and should be taken as the primary objective and expectation of this course.
This course introduces students to the critical and historical study of performance as a mode of ... more This course introduces students to the critical and historical study of performance as a mode of cultural production. It situates global theatrical traditions within that discourse while addressing a range of culturally-specific, historical human performances outside the theatre (ritual, play, sporting events, fashion shows, public speech, architecture, film, political protest, performance art, everyday social behaviors, etc) that function theatrically, or rather performatively-that is, they both reflect and create shared social reality by being done and being seen. Across the semester we will read performance theory and focus on the analysis of performance objects, including pieces of theatre. We will ask: what does it mean to perform? Why do people perform? What are the elements that combine to create a performance experience, and how can they be artfully manipulated? How do performance forms, formats, and meanings differ across cultures, times and places? What are the effects of performance events in the world? Why do we devote our lives to the making of performance? And more analytically: How is meaning being made in performance? How does performance function within a particular cultural context? How do performances constitute, regulate or disrupt power formations across a range of differently constituted social realities? Performance carries enormous force in our world; driven by the politics and pitfalls of visibility, it does nothing less than constitute the horizons of possibility within social reality as well as the norms of the everyday. The ethics of performing, then, are of central concern to artists who seek to make performance. Theatre, as an industry and practice, is right now confronting its history of embedded racism and exclusion in the United States and globally. We, too, will ask how theatre and other forms of performance have contributed to unjust social realities, as well as how performance can function as a site of transgression and resistance of hegemonic forces that seek to condition performing bodies. We will address these issues historically and theoretically and by frequently engaging non-Eurocentric performance and nonwhite theorists and artists. We will also frequently pause to ask about ways of articulating/demonstrating learning that may exist outside of 'traditional' practices in higher education. I am not an expert in all of the theoretical and cultural areas we will engage. I welcome the lived experience that all of you bring to our conversations and collective learning as well as feedback about my own ways of holding space for those contributions.
An under examined radical in twentieth century American music (and an occasional itinerant), Harr... more An under examined radical in twentieth century American music (and an occasional itinerant), Harry Partch composed with an unequal forty-three-note octave that he derived from his study of natural harmonics. Working in the tonal interstices of the twelve-note, tempered
A dramatic adaptation of Walcott's poem, commissioned by Stanford Repertory Theatre, 2010.
Office Hours: Tues/Thurs 12-2 CA 276 GOALS 1) To provide students with a working knowledge of the... more Office Hours: Tues/Thurs 12-2 CA 276 GOALS 1) To provide students with a working knowledge of the history of Western dramatic literature and to briefly touch on global performance forms.
Thesis Chapters by Matthew Moore
This dissertation examines the ways in which tragedy produces, and challenges, human subjectivi... more This dissertation examines the ways in which tragedy produces, and challenges, human subjectivity in three distinct periods of western theatrical production. It also tells a story of their ahistorical continuity based on tragic repetition. Readings of Aeschylus' Oresteia, Sophocles' Oedipus Tyrannos, and Euripides' Bacchae ground this argument in the Greek original. Specific constructions of fate, agency and justice provide sites for understanding the evolution of a tragic consciousness. Charting a meta-narrative of tragic inheritance through Greek tragedy, Renaissance tragic drama, and the modern drama, I establish an alternative view of western theatre's past—one that embodies its own consciously adopted tragic form.
Renaissance artists repressed the knowledge structures contained in the artifacts of a past consciousness in service of Christian morality and bourgeois rationality. By creating a hybrid moral tragedy rooted in contemporary ways of knowing, they valorized the human perspective in contradiction to the world-centered one that Greek tragedy staged. As a result, the dramatic tradition increasingly excluded that which could not self-disclose from its catalogue of the real. It secured the illusion of autonomous human agency, creating the conditions for its own literary and historical tragic reversal. Marlowe's Doctor Faustus, Shakespeare's Macbeth, Hamlet and Winter's Tale model this contradiction.
Finally, I retheorize Szondi's “crisis of the drama” reading Strindberg's Miss Julie, Ibsen's Hedda Gabler and Chekhov's The Cherry Orchard as a final cycle of tragedy that stages historical transformation as the suicide of dramatic realism.
Book Reviews by Matthew Moore
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Papers by Matthew Moore
Thesis Chapters by Matthew Moore
Renaissance artists repressed the knowledge structures contained in the artifacts of a past consciousness in service of Christian morality and bourgeois rationality. By creating a hybrid moral tragedy rooted in contemporary ways of knowing, they valorized the human perspective in contradiction to the world-centered one that Greek tragedy staged. As a result, the dramatic tradition increasingly excluded that which could not self-disclose from its catalogue of the real. It secured the illusion of autonomous human agency, creating the conditions for its own literary and historical tragic reversal. Marlowe's Doctor Faustus, Shakespeare's Macbeth, Hamlet and Winter's Tale model this contradiction.
Finally, I retheorize Szondi's “crisis of the drama” reading Strindberg's Miss Julie, Ibsen's Hedda Gabler and Chekhov's The Cherry Orchard as a final cycle of tragedy that stages historical transformation as the suicide of dramatic realism.
Book Reviews by Matthew Moore
Renaissance artists repressed the knowledge structures contained in the artifacts of a past consciousness in service of Christian morality and bourgeois rationality. By creating a hybrid moral tragedy rooted in contemporary ways of knowing, they valorized the human perspective in contradiction to the world-centered one that Greek tragedy staged. As a result, the dramatic tradition increasingly excluded that which could not self-disclose from its catalogue of the real. It secured the illusion of autonomous human agency, creating the conditions for its own literary and historical tragic reversal. Marlowe's Doctor Faustus, Shakespeare's Macbeth, Hamlet and Winter's Tale model this contradiction.
Finally, I retheorize Szondi's “crisis of the drama” reading Strindberg's Miss Julie, Ibsen's Hedda Gabler and Chekhov's The Cherry Orchard as a final cycle of tragedy that stages historical transformation as the suicide of dramatic realism.