LIT 4044 Spring 2018 Gontarski

Unlike the Nobel Prize, the annual American Pulitzer Prize is awarded in recognition of immediate worth rather than, say, lifetime achievement. In some years no award has been given, a statement that no work of that year has been deemed worthy of such distinction, although even that, like other award decisions, is often tinged with political bias. This course will feature dramatic works that have been awarded the Pulitzer Prize and are often thought of as Masterworks of American Theatre, particularly the work of Eugene O'Neill, Tennessee Williams, Arthur Miller, William Inge, Edward Albee, and Sam Shepard, among other Pulitzer Prize winners. We will furthermore examine and discuss these playwrights as process writers with theater itself as an unstable extension of that process and film as yet another revision or translation. We will, that is, examine these playwrights’ habits of writing and rewriting their plays from performance to performance, sometimes offering two or three endings to directors and publishers, of adapting works from short stories to plays, to films, of rewriting failed plays under new titles for stage and/or film, to the point in this process that deciding on a stable or final text is perhaps impossible for theatrical works. We will test these assumptions with close readings of individual works and by examining their adaptations into performance, especially the alterations made for film versions.