ENGL 102

Spring 2016 Part of Term 1

Part of Term 1
Jan 19-May 4

Intro to Drama

SHOW FINAL EXAM SCHEDULE

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 spring 2016
	CRN	Type	Section	Time	Day	Location	Instructor	Section Details
	34532	Lecture-Discussion	P	11:00AM -12:15PM	TR	English Building	Perry, C	Part of Term: 1 Date Range: 01/19/16-05/04/16 Degree Notes: Humanities - Lit & Arts course. Section Info: Plays are wonderful to think with: they are short enough to hold in mind, but they usually tell stories that are complexly social in nature and that reflect (at least implicitly) the values and concerns of the societies for which they are produced. And if they are performed, they are themselves communal events. This is a course about understanding drama as a literary form, but in the case of drama it is not possible to separate literary analysis from performance setting and social context. In this class, we will read and discuss a series of mostly well-known comedies and tragedies from the European dramatic tradition, starting in Ancient Greece with Euripides’s Medea (431 BCE) and ending in the 21st Century with Caryl Churchill’s clone play A Number. In addition to learning how to read and think about fantastic plays by a variety of writers, students should come away from this class with the following: a sense of how (and maybe even why) different forms of comedy work; an understanding of how tragedy as a genre has evolved; a richer sense of the different ways that different cultures imagine the social function of drama; a strong and well-informed understanding of how different kinds of theater spaces and presentational styles relate to and enable different kinds of stories told in different places and times; a concrete sense of the myriad cultural contexts that inform any play as text and as performance script.