Three-part seminar series with Dhananjay Jagannathan, Tara Isabella Burton, and Sam Booth

In 1837, when Georg Büchner died at age 23, he left unfinished the manuscript of Woyzeck, a play exploring the classic theme of romantic jealousy but set amidst the traumas of peasant life in Germany. Only discovered several decades later, the manuscript began a series of transformations, first as a completed stage production, then as a 1925 Alban Berg opera, a 1979 Werner Herzog film, and finally, the 2010s immersive theater production The Drowned Man. Each creation tells its own version of the Woyzeck story from the materials Büchner left, reflecting also the concerns of its own creators and cultural context. In this seminar, participants will explore, through these versions of a single story, the idea that tragedy can belong not just to a world of heroes but to our own worlds. In the three sessions, we will move between philosophical, literary, and theatrical perspectives.

In this first seminar, Prof. Dhananjay Jagannathan (Columbia) will help us explore what we mean by tragedy, and whether there can be tragedy with ordinary characters.