“In the destructive element,immerse. . . .” There were times during the 20th century when Joseph Conrad’s mandate of modernity, its apocalyptic imperative for the artist, seemed more than realized by the sinkhole of history, its atrocities, devastations, and ubiquitous terror. As for the utopian dream of revolution, its recurring scenario—dramaturgically worked out in the 18th century: proclamations of human rights disenchanted by the Reign of Terror—it is still competing with catastrophe, or the prospect of it, past the millennium. If the calamity of 9/11 never happened, in a worldwide scourge of computer bugs, there remains an ominous repertoire of looming disaster: nuclear threats, chemical warfare, rogue states or renegade powers, the remote labyrinths of immanent terrorism, and as prayers go up through whatever gods in the ozone layer, the liability of global warming on this imperiled earth. Amidst the virulent latencies of the global economy it sometimes seems as if we live, if not by blanking out, by selective inattention, as with the spread of AIDS through parts of the world where gratuitous slaughter also continues, as often as not with a deployment of terror in the name of revolution.

Yet somehow the dream continues, and as a counterpoint to apocalyptic thinking the “real” revolution awaits its next incarnation. And it is precisely this counterpoint we shall be studying in the seminar, from perhaps the most brilliant drama ever written on the illusion of revolution, Georg Büchner’s Danton’s Death, through certain redemptive or lurid fantasies of the living end, as in Strindberg’s Dream Play or Beckett’s Endgame, with its paragons of the living dead who, with a curious exhilaration in despair, bear it out repetitively to the (never) ending doom, to Heiner Müller’s The Task, where—as the revolutionary debate is posed in existential and theatrical terms—it is the Angel of Despair who declares: “I am the knife with which the dead man cracks open his coffin.”

Not sure yet, exactly, what the actual list will be, but as with Ibsen’s When We Dead Awaken or Yeats’ The Resurrection, we shall be reading throughout at the extremities of drama, including plays from the once-incendiary, now-classical avant-garde (expressionism, futurism, dada), as well as material from contemporary British and American drama—and maybe, too, spinoff from the drama in body and performance art.