Our Town and Other Works by Thornton Wilder

Course Description

Our Town is one of the leading candidates for the title "The Great American Play," and it is for this dramatic work that Thornton Wilder is best known. But Wilder was one of the most versatile writers in American letters, having written plays, novels, screenplays, essays, librettos, and journals. He remains the only writer to win a Pulitzer Prize for both drama and fiction. In this seminar students study the Pulitzer-winning Our Town in depth, analyzing the text and comparing video adaptations, as well as reading scholarship. Students also study Wilder's other famous full-length plays, The Skin of Our Teeth (also winner of the Pulitzer Prize) and The Matchmaker (from which the Broadway hit musical Hello, Dolly! was adapted), a selection of his one-act plays, his screenplay for the Alfred Hitchcock film Shadow of a Doubt, his most famous novel The Bridge of San Luis Rey (Pulitzer Prize winner), and a selection of his published essays on theatre and literature. Finally, students read excerpts of theories of tragedy and comedy that may well have informed his writing (e.g., Aristotle's Poetics or Nietzsche's The Birth of Tragedy) or help to understand his plays as examples of their genre (e.g., Northrop Frye's "Comedy: The Mythos of Spring" or Eric Bentley's "Farce"). This seminar is designed to appeal to students interested in theatre, literature, and philosophy, as Wilder was a philosophical writer who in his creative work views life simultaneously from the perspective of the microcosm and the macrocosm. His great themes are the suffering of the human heart, the effects of the passage of time on individuals and families, and the progress of human civilization despite threats to its survival.