Mar 28, 2024  
Catalogue 2019-2020 
    
Catalogue 2019-2020 [ARCHIVED CATALOG]

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ENGL 216 - Modern Drama: Text and Performance after 1800

Semester Offered: Fall
1 unit(s)
Study of modern dramatic texts and their embodiment both on the page and the stage. Authors, critical and theoretical approaches, dramatic genres, historical coverage, and themes may vary from year to year.

Topic 2019/20a: Dysfunctional Families. This course explores modern American plays that present debacles in the private sphere and its most widely accepted, codified, and institutionalized social manifestation: the family. As a site of incessant conflicts and negotiations between the individual and the other, and between the intimate and the public, the family offers an ideal framework and subject matter for commentary on a variety of moral and social issues. Through an overview of contemporary American drama, this course pays particular attention to the vestiges of the American Dream in a range of dramatic representations of dysfunctional families. As a survey with a special focus, the course may include plays by Edward Albee, Lorraine Hansberry, David Henry Hwang, Basil Kreimendahl, Tracy Letts, Taylor Mac, Arthur Miller, Marsha Norman, Eugene O’Neill, Suzan-Lori Parks, Sam Shepard, Tennessee Williams, and August Wilson. We also read selected theoretical texts about the role and significance of family in the 20th century. Zoltán Márkus

Two 75-minute periods.



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