BASC70294 - Tom Stoppard - Rock 'N' Roll and Indian Ink

Course Description

Instructor: Claudia Traudt.  This study will concentrate on Tom Stoppard’s plays Indian Ink (1995) and Rock ‘N’ Roll (2006) The works take, place, wrack and delight perceivers, as is often Stoppard’s delicious and provocative wont, in doubling and multiple time periods, locales, conditions, modalities. Via the British sisters Flora and Eleanor Crewe, Indian painter Nirad and his son Anish, American academic Eldon Pike – and many others - the Indian Ink summons 1930 India, 1980’s England and America, Gandhi, the British Raj’s products, poetry, painting, politics and personal longings over Europe and the subcontinent.  Rock ‘N’ Roll summons the turbulence, hope, despair, the personalness and political penetration – and the quite literal “inspiration” of rock and roll - over the Prague Spring of 1968, the Velvet Revolution of 1989, the Prague Rolling Stones concert of 1990 in Eastern bloc Czechoslovalia, Cambridge, England, the world. Through close readings of the texts and selected screenings, we will savor and discern revelations, imbedments, implications in both content and Stoppard’s scintillating usages. Course code: BASC70294 Literature