ENGLISH 362 Drama Tuesday-Thursday 9:00–10:15 Craig Howes
The catalogue course description reads “Basic concepts and representative texts for the study of the form, function, and development of the genre of drama.” We will definitely accomplish this, but ideally, we will also become familiar with specific texts, modes of performance, and the politics and aesthetics of drama as a meeting place for writing, performance, and a great deal more.
We will cover a great deal of time and ground. Dramatists studied will include Sophocles, the Everyman author, Shakespeare, Ibsen, Wilde, Chekhov, Brecht, Beckett, Weiss, Churchill, August Wilson, Kushner, Parks, Vogel, Nottage, Kneubuhl, and Apio. We will start in Greece, and end in Hawaiʻi. Aristotle, Brecht, Artaud, and other theorists of drama will be read as well.
Students will be required to provide frequent postings on the course content, as well as theatrical review assignments, short critical and theoretical papers, speech memorization, and at least one staging assignment. There will be individual conferences with an option for revision on all written assignments.
The 3rd Edition of the Norton Shorter Anthology of Drama will be the text, which contains most of the plays we’ll be reading. Weiss, Kneubuhl, and Apio will need to be purchased separately.