ENGL 102

Fall 2013 All Classes

All Classes

Intro to Drama

Credit: 3 hours.

Explores such topics as the history of dramatic form, the major dramatic genres, the dramatic traditions of various cultures, and key terms used in the analysis of dramatic works. Reading plays from the ancient Greeks to the contemporary theatre, students will be taught skills in close reading and literary interpretation. Students will consider the importance of performance, considering how meanings might be represented through visual and aural means.

This course satisfies the General Education Criteria in Fall 2022 for:

Humanities – Lit & Arts

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ENGL 102 class schedule data for fall 2013
	CRN	Type	Section	Time	Day	Location	Instructor	Section Details
	32286	Lecture	S	2:00PM -3:15PM	TR	245 Everitt Laboratory	Slobodnik, S	Part of Term: 1 Date Range: 08/26/13-12/11/13 Degree Notes: Literature and the Arts course. Section Info: In this class we will read selected major plays from the European dramatic tradition (from classical Greece to the present), paying particular attention to the ways that changes in form, genre, and presentation style reflect changing ideas about people, society, and the social function of dramatic entertainment. What kinds of stories have different cultures thought to be suitable subjects for tragedy, and why? What does it mean to be tragic, anyway? And why do people want to see stories that end unhappily? How does the meaning of slapstick, farce, or low bodily humor change over time? Or does it, since there are fart jokes in classical Greek comedy and medieval morality plays that are not all that different from gross-out comedy in a contemporary movie? What other kinds of comedies are there? How do they work? How do different staging conventions create different possibilities for representation and/or different modes of interaction between actors and audience? And so on. Students should come away from this class with some overview of the history of dramatic form (though this will have to be done in pretty broad strokes, since we?ll be traipsing over thousands of years and all of Europe), with a deep understanding of several odd, brilliant, and provocative plays, and with a much sharper sense of the way different forms of theater reflect and participate in their different social milieus. We will consider plays (in English translation, where necessary) by many or all of the following playwrights: Anonymous, Aristophanes, Behn, Brecht, Churchill, Euripides, Ibsen, Marlowe, Moli�re, Seneca, Shakespeare, and Wilde.