The Dramatic Turn: Theater, Science, and Russian Literature

The Dramatic Turn: Theater, Science, and Russian Literature explores how artistic culture interacts with modern science. Drawing upon nineteenth-century literature, I contend that scientific progress turned prose writers into playwrights. When Russian writers began to perceive the realist novel as inadequate to the demands of the scientific age, they turned to theater in search of new representational modes. I theorize that, in the age of scientific positivism, when modern science seemed to address most questions, theater took on a task of representing phenomena that modern science seemingly could not—or would not—explain. Confronted with ostensibly inexplicable phenomena—religious conversions, sudden moral awakenings, self-sacrificial acts of love, extreme political violence—literary culture activated its theatrical imagination to depict and understand the irrational and the irrepresentable. The Dramatic Turn thereby argues that the entanglement of theater, science, and literature not only affected all three of these domains, but shaped our very idea of what we can—and cannot—know.