What exactly do we mean when we call something “melodramatic”? In colloquial speech, melodramatic is a derisive term, used to dismiss certain artworks and categories of persons—such as women, gay men and people of color—on the basis of their excessive feeling. Yet, though the term has the power to marginalize, this course will examine the centrality of melodrama to modern definitions of race, gender, and sexuality by analyzing how the narrative and visual devices of melodrama encode the historical transformations of these identity categories.
The course will center on three key tropes in melodrama: the pathologization of transgressive desire, sexual violence, and interracial violence. We will begin with the 1939 film Gone with the Wind in order to establish a foundational vocabulary for describing melodrama’s formal characteristics and then move backward to analyze the codification of the aforementioned tropes on the nineteenth-century stage. We will then examine how postwar Hollywood film uses these tropes in order to translate the dehumanization and restriction experienced by women, queers and African-Americans into feelings of melancholy and resignation which critics argue defer political critique. Our course concludes with the relationship between melodrama and identity politics by studying how post-1968 work responding to sexual assault, LGBT civil rights and AIDS appropriates melodramatic conventions in order to declare an explicitly political project. Readings include the dramas Camille, Tosca, The Octoroon, Angels in America and An Octoroon; the films Black Narcissus, The Children’s Hour, Outrage, Imitation of Life, Milk, and Yoko Ono’s Rape; the course ends with the television serials Mad Men and Orange is the New Black. Students will also be introduced to key feminist, queer and critical race scholarship on affect theory and the relation between identity politics and representation.
 | melodrama_syllabus_-_spring_2016.pdf | 215 KB |