FRS 002AA — Sec. 001 — (2 unit) — CRN 65517 — W 3:10-5:00pm — 25 Wellman
Unhappy Families: Staging Family Trauma in Contemporary Film and Theater

Instructor: Gail Finney, Department of Comparative Literature, College of Letters and Science

Description: Family trauma is primal trauma: the ancient Greek tragedians knew that all that is necessary for a tragedy is a family. At the turn of this millennium, American film and theater have begun to devote increasing attention to family trauma: not simply divorce, inept parents, and alcoholism, but radical, destructive alienation and lack of communication between family members; addictions of all kinds; child and spousal abuse; child molestation and parent-child incest, sibling incest; suicide; and murder. After studying a prototypical depiction of family trauma in Sophocles's play Oedipus the King, the seminar will take a close look at the portrayal of this theme in several contemporary American plays and films, with an eye to discovering how these works, through the evocation and resolution of primal fears and fantasies, can function as productive cathartic mechanisms for our times. The seminar has three major aims: 1) To familiarize students with the motivations and implications of family trauma as a theme in drama and film; 2) To study the ways in which family trauma is repressed or concealed, remembered, revealed, dramatized, framed—in short, staged—in contemporary American drama and film; 3) To introduce students to the aesthetic differences between dramatic and cinematic portrayal by focusing on a similar theme in both media.

Format: Seminar sessions will consist of short background lectures, discussion, and in some instances group presentations. In the sessions devoted to films I will show clips for the students to analyze and discuss (in each case they will first view the entire film outside of class in the Hart Hall Video Center.) 1) Each student will be required to take part in a group presentation of ca. 15-20 minutes per group; this may include the acting out of a scene from one of the plays or films, together with close analysis by the members of the group; 2) Short paper (five pages) on a topic to be determined in consultation with me; due Monday, June 14.
Texts will be as follows:
Plays:
Sophocles, Oedipus the King (fifth century B.C.), in The Three Theban Plays (Penguin Classics)
Sam Shepard, Buried Child (1978), in Shepard, Seven Plays (Bantam)
Paula Vogel, How I Learned to Drive (1997), in Vogel, The Mammary Plays (TCG) Films:
Frank Capra, It's A Wonderful Life (1946) (as paradigm for familial ideal in postwar U.S.)
Sam Mendes, American Beauty (1999)
Sofia Coppola, The Virgin Suicides (2000)

Note: I did not select these texts solely on the basis of theme; Buried Child and How I Learned to Drive both won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama, and American Beauty received an Academy Award for Best Picture of 1999. Grading: Grading breakdown: Class participation: 25%; Group presentation: 25%;Paper: 50%.

About the Instructor: Gail Finney has been a Professor of Comparative Literature and German at UC Davis since 1988. Her books include The Counterfeit Idyll: The Garden Ideal and Social Reality in Nineteenth-Century Fiction, Women in Modern Drama: Freud, Feminism, and European Theater at the Turn of the Century, Look Who’s Laughing: Gender and Comedy (ed.), and Christa Wolf. She is now working on a book entitled Children of Oedipus: Staging Family Trauma in Contemporary Film.