The Trouble with Reality

Layer III

Scholarly Journals

Original essays for deeper study, each pointing to the real scholarship behind it.

No. 1

The Shattered Whole: Woyzeck and the Poetics of the Fragment

Abstract. Büchner left no fixed scene order. Rather than a defect, the fragment is the play's argument: a self broken by poverty, military discipline and medical exploitation cannot be shown as a coherent arc. The episodic form prefigures Expressionism and Brecht, and asks each production to assemble its own Woyzeck.

Further reading

  • John Reddick, Georg Büchner: The Shattered Whole (Oxford, 1994)
  • Peter Szondi, Theory of the Modern Drama (1956; Eng. trans. 1987)

No. 2

The Poor as Protagonist: Class and Tragedy After Büchner

Abstract. Classical tragedy reserved its dignity for kings. Woyzeck grants a barber-soldier the full weight of tragic suffering, and locates guilt in the Captain's moralizing and the Doctor's experiments as much as in the murderer's hand. The essay traces this move to Hauptmann, Gorky and beyond.

Further reading

  • Raymond Williams, Drama from Ibsen to Brecht (1968)
  • Raymond Williams, Modern Tragedy (1966)

No. 3

Beyond the Problem Play: Ibsen and Modernism

Abstract. Ibsen is often filed as a 'realist' writing 'problem plays'. Recent scholarship argues he was a modernist, staging the collapse of idealism and the struggle for authentic selfhood within everyday life. The parlor is not a neutral backdrop but a trap.

Further reading

  • Toril Moi, Henrik Ibsen and the Birth of Modernism (Oxford, 2006)
  • George Bernard Shaw, The Quintessence of Ibsenism (1891)

No. 4

The Door Heard Round the World: Reception of A Doll's House

Abstract. From the altered 'German ending' to suffragist readings and Ibsen's own 1898 remark that he was not consciously working for women's rights, Nora's exit shows how audiences remake a play in their own image.

Further reading

  • Ibsen Studies (journal, Taylor & Francis)
  • Modern Drama (journal, University of Toronto Press)
ContinueLayer IV: Back to Today →