- Code
- ELL 424
- Name
- Drama Studies
- Semester
- 2
- Lecture hours
- 4.00
- Seminar hours
- 0.00
- Laborator hours
- 0.00
- Credits
- 4.00
- ECTS
- 6.00
- Description
-
This course is meant as discussions that should be friendly to students of drama interested in dramatic texts. However, the lectures draw upon scholarship and previous interpretations and I try to make my arguments persuasive with evidence from the plays themselves. Theater and Drama have generated a rapidly and ever expanding international literature; of documentation, fiercely competing movements and ideologies, technical innovations and experimentation beyond the scope of this course but available to the diligent reader from many resources.
- Objectives
-
To provide the tools and nurture your ability to read drama, fictions, and rituals of other cultures seriously, appreciatively, pleasurably, and critically, helping you to become a "lifelong learner." To increase your consciousness of ethical, historical, political and artistic questions and approaches to the world, so that you can function more sensitively, intelligently and effectively in the world. To encourage a clearer understanding of your own personal skills and creativity, increasing your self-awareness and the accuracy of your self-analysis, so that you can sustain a realistic sense of confidence and are better positioned to achieve whatever goals you set for yourself. To improve and refine your abilities to express and communicate ideas, feelings, and arguments effectively and persuasively, so that you can know what you believe and can work and lead as a member of a team or community. To encourage your understanding, enjoyment, attendance to and participation in theater, for its own sake.
- Java
- Tema
- 1
- Introduction. Drama and Theatre. History, periodization, trends and developments. The objective of this lecture is to think hard about "drama": meanings, assumptions, prejudices. To understand why this class matters and how it is designed, and recognizing the skills to be learned.Discussion of Euripides' The Bacchae. Objective To understand the assumptions and structure of Greek drama, the scene as unit. Drama as change over time, v. intensive structure. Initial self-appraisal: consciousness of what you know, the skills base you bring, and what you want to learn.
- 2
- The beginnings of the classical drama and the pantheon of ancient Greece.To interpret drama as a complex set of perspectives on values. To think historically, symbolically and poetically. To share responses orally.To consider the philosophical bases for drama: what one learns, what is real, what one feels. Discuss the nature of tragedy and its effects on an audience.
- 3
- Ritual and drama This lecture will consider the communal purposes of ritual and drama in religious contexts, reflect upon the relationships between scripture and drama, and between belief/holiness/reverence and representation,experience the pleasure of performing. Enact and Discuss The Second Shepherds Play.To reflect further upon drama as ritual in a different cultural context, and upon the role of performance in shaping interpretation. To discuss the role of translation (poetic, cultural, contextual) in dramatic performance.
- 4
- Evolution and supertext of Elisabethan drama. Varieties of Shakespearean criticism. His tragedies and comedies.Extensive Drama. Discuss Christopher Marlowe's Doctor Faustus. To understand the role of poetry in drama. To read Elizabethan drama historically, comprehending what is "early modern" about this protagonist and his story.To discern meaning through juxtaposition, as well as other dimensions of extensive structure.
- 5
- Discussion of Aphra Behn's The Rover To locate Restoration comedy within its post-war culture. Further practice in analyzing extensive dramatic structure, including patterns of repetition-with-a-difference and foils.To analyze the components and varieties of comedy, and to understand the logic behind some classic comic tropes.
- 6
- Modern Experiments Discussion and Performance of Luigi Pirandello's Six Characters in Search of an Author. Pirandellans: To perform vividly and lead the discussion and analysis effectively, educating your audience. Brechtians: To attend carefully, critically and generously as an audience member and contributor to discussion.
- 7
- A change came in the Victorian era with a profusion on the London stage of farces, musical burlesques, extravaganzas and comic operas that competed with Shakespeare productions and serious drama by the likes of James Planché and Thomas William Robertson. In 1855, the German Reed Entertainments began a process of elevating the level of (formerly risqué) musical theatre in Britain that culminated in the famous series of comic operas by Gilbert and Sullivan and were followed by the 1890s with the first Edwardian musical comedies. W. S. Gilbert and Oscar Wilde were leading poets and dramatists of the late Victorian period.[16] Wilde's plays, in particular, stand apart from the many now forgotten plays of Victorian times and have a much closer relationship to those of the Edwardian dramatists such as Irishman George Bernard Shaw and Norwegian Henrik Ibsen.
- 8
- Mid term exam
- 9
- George Bernard Shaw Pygmalion. His philosophical views, dramatic elements of his plays. The theatre: 1901–45 Edwardian musical comedy held the London stage (not together with foreign operetta imports) until World War I and was then supplanted by increasingly popular American musical theatre and comedies by Noël Coward, Ivor Novello and their contemporaries. The motion picture mounted a challenge to the stage. At first, films were silent and presented only a limited challenge to theatre. But by the end of the 1920s, films like The Jazz Singer could be presented with synchronized sound, and critics wondered if the cinema would replace live theatre altogether. Some dramatists wrote for the new medium, but playwriting continued. Irish playwrights George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950) and J. M. Synge (1871–1909) were influential in British drama. Shaw's career began in the last decade of the nineteenth-century and he wrote more than 60 plays. Synge's plays belong to the first decade of the twentieth century. Synge's most famous play, The Playboy of the Western World, "caused outrage and riots when it was first performed" in Dublin in 1907. George Bernard Shaw turned the Edwardian theatre into an arena for debate about important political and social issues, like marriage, class, "the morality of armaments and war" and the rights of women
- 10
- Drama and the theatre of the end of the 19th century. Renewal of the Theatre. The period 1945–2000 An important cultural movement in the British theatre which developed in the late 1950s and early 1960s was Kitchen sink realism (or "kitchen sink drama"), a term coined to describe art (the term itself derives from an expressionist painting by John Bratby), novels, film and television plays. The term angry young men was often applied to members of this artistic movement. It used a style of social realism which depicts the domestic lives of the working class, to explore social issues and political issues. The drawing room plays of the post-war period, typical of dramatists like Terence Rattigan and Noël Coward were challenged in the 1950s by these Angry Young Men, in plays like John Osborne's Look Back in Anger (1956). Arnold Wesker and Nell Dunn also brought social concerns to the stage. Again In the 1950s, the absurdist play Waiting for Godot (1955) (originally En attendant Godot, 1952), by the French resident Irishman Samuel Beckett profoundly affected British drama. The Theatre of the Absurd influenced Harold Pinter (1930-2008), (The Birthday Party, 1958), whose works are often characterised by menace or claustrophobia. Beckett also influenced Tom Stoppard (1937-) (Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead,1966). Stoppard's works are, however, also notable for their high-spirited wit and the great range of intellectual issues which he tackles in different plays.
- 11
- Miller, Williams, and Albee Two post-World War II playwrights established reputations comparable to Eugene O’Neill’s. Arthur Miller wrote eloquent essays defending his modern, democratic concept of tragedy; despite its abstract, allegorical quality and portentous language, Death of a Salesman (1949) came close to vindicating his views.
- 12
- Miller. Miller’s intense family dramas were rooted in the problem dramas of Henrik Ibsen and the works of the socially conscious ethnic dramatists of the 1930s, especially Clifford Odets, but Miller gave them a metaphysical turn. From All My Sons (1947) to The Price (1968), his work was at its strongest when he dealt with father-son relationships, anchored in the harsh realities of the Great Depression. Yet Miller could also be an effective protest writer, as in The Crucible (1953), which used the Salem witch trials to attack the witch-hunting of the McCarthy era. Though his work was uneven, Tennessee Williams at his best was a more powerful and effective playwright than Miller. Creating stellar roles for actors, especially women, Williams brought a passionate lyricism and a tragic Southern vision to such plays as The Glass Menagerie (1944), A Streetcar Named Desire (1947), Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1955), and The Night of the Iguana (1961). He empathized with his characters’ dreams and illusions and with the frustrations and defeats of their lives, and he wrote about his own dreams and disappointments in his beautifully etched short fiction, from which his plays were often adapted.Oscar Wilde. The importance of being earnest.
- 13
- Then, in 1962, Edward Albee’s reputation, based on short plays such as The Zoo Story (1959) and The American Dream (1960), was secured by the stunning power of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? A master of absurdist theatre who assimilated the influence of European playwrights such as Samuel Beckett and Eugène Ionesco, Albee established himself as a major figure in American drama. His reputation with critics and audiences, however, began to decline with enigmatic plays such as Tiny Alice (1964) and A Delicate Balance (1966), but, like O’Neill, he eventually returned to favour with a complex autobiographical drama, Three Tall Women (1994). The Off-Broadway ascendancy The centre of American drama shifted from Broadway to Off-Broadway and Off-Off-Broadway with works such as Jack Gelber’s The Connection (1959). American playwrights, collaborating with the Living Theatre, the Open Theatre, and other adventurous new companies, were increasingly free to write radical and innovative plays. David Rabe’s The Basic Training of Pavlo Hummel (1971) and Sticks and Bones (1972) satirized America’s militaristic nationalism and cultural shallowness. David Mamet won a New York Drama Critics’ Circle Award for American Buffalo (1976). In plays such as Glengarry Glen Ross (1984), he showed brilliantly how men reveal their hopes and frustrations obliquely, through their language, and in Oleanna (1992) he fired a major salvo in the gender wars over sexual harassment. Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones) and Ed Bullins inspired an angry Black nationalist theatre. Baraka’s Dutchman and The Slave (1964) effectively dramatized racial confrontation, while Bullins’s In the Wine Time (1968) made use of “street” lyricism. Maria Irene Fornés’s Fefu and Her Friends (1977) proved remarkable in its exploration of women’s relationships. A clear indication of Off-Broadway’s ascendancy in American drama came in 1979 when Sam Shepard, a prolific and experimental playwright, won the Pulitzer Prize for Buried Child. Shepard’s earlier work, such as The Tooth of Crime (1972), was rooted both in the rock scene and counterculture of the 1960s and in the mythic world of the American West. He reached his peak with a series of offbeat dramas dealing with fierce family conflict, including Curse of the Starving Class (1976), True West (1980), Fool for Love (1983), and A Lie of the Mind (1986). Amiri Baraka Amiri Baraka Amiri Baraka. AP/REX/Shutterstock.com Other important new voices in American drama were the prolific Lanford Wilson, Pulitzer winner for Talley’s Folly (1979); John Guare, who created serious farce in The House of Blue Leaves (1971) and fresh social drama in Six Degrees of Separation (1990); and Ntozake Shange, whose “choreopoem” For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide/When the Rainbow Is Enuf moved to Broadway in 1976. Other well-received women playwrights included Marsha Norman, Beth Henley, Tina Howe, and Wendy Wasserstein. In a series of plays that included Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom (1984), Fences (1987), for which he won a Pulitzer Prize, and Joe Turner’s Come and Gone (1986), August Wilson emerged as the most powerful Black playwright of the 1980s. Devoting each play to a different decade of life in the 20th century, he won a second Pulitzer Prize, for The Piano Lesson (1990), and completed the 10-play cycle in 2005, shortly before his death. The anguish of the AIDS epidemic proved a dark inspiration to many gay playwrights, especially Tony Kushner, who had gained attention with A Bright Room Called Day (1991), set in Germany in 1932–33; he won Broadway fame with his epically ambitious two-part drama Angels in America (1991–92), which combined comedy with pain, symbolism with personal history, and invented characters with historical ones. A committed political writer, Kushner often focused on public themes. His later plays included Slavs! (1996) and the timely Homebody/Kabul (2001), a brilliant monologue followed by a drama set in Taliban-controlled Afghanistan. After writing several Off-Broadway plays about Chinese Americans, David Henry Hwang achieved critical and commercial success on Broadway with his gender-bending drama M. Butterfly (1988). Richard Nelson found an enthusiastic following in London for literate plays such as Some Americans Abroad (1989) and Two Shakespearean Actors (1990), while Richard Greenberg depicted Jewish American life and both gay and straight relationships in Eastern Standard (1989), The American Plan (1990), and Take Me Out (2002), the last about a gay baseball player who reveals his homosexuality to his teammates. Donald Margulies dealt more directly with Jewish family life in The Loman Family Picnic (1989). He also explored the ambitions and relationships of artists in such plays as Sight Unseen (1992) and Collected Stories (1998).
- 14
- Postmodern theatre is a recent phenomenon in world theatre, coming as it does out of the postmodern philosophy that originated in Europe in the middle of the twentieth century. Postmodern theatre emerged as a reaction against modernist theatre. Most postmodern productions are centered on highlighting the fallibility of definite truth, instead encouraging the audience to reach their own individual understanding. Essentially, thus, postmodern theatre raises questions rather than attempting to supply answers.
- 15
- Review
- 16
- Final Exam
- 1
- to develop in the students the ability to better understand dramatic structure and to include an in-depth analysis of dramatic literature representatives.
- 2
- To enable students to more clearly understand the role of drama in the development of society since the period of ancient Greek drama.
- 3
- To enable students to discuss complex issues related to drama and culture, and the mutual effects they have between them.
- 4
- Encourage students to think critically about literary texts where the main features and elements of theater and drama are displayed
- 5
- To enable students to demonstrate the ability to analyze and interpret dramatic texts that we study both critically and theoretically
- 6
- Encourage students to discuss a wide range of questions and issues while facing the world of theater and drama.
- Quantity Percentage Total percent
- Midterms
- 1 20% 20%
- Quizzes
- 0 0% 0%
- Projects
- 4 10% 40%
- Term projects
- 0 0% 0%
- Laboratories
- 0 0% 0%
- Class participation
- 0 0% 0%
- Total term evaluation percent
- 60%
- Final exam percent
- 40%
- Total percent
- 100%
- Quantity Duration (hours) Total (hours)
- Course duration (including exam weeks)
- 16 4 64
- Off class study hours
- 14 5 70
- Duties
- 4 4 16
- Midterms
- 1 4 4
- Final exam
- 1 4 4
- Other
- 0 0 0
- Total workLoad
- 158
- Total workload / 25 (hours)
- 6.32
- ECTS
- 6.00