This module introduces key knowledge and skills that will be essential in students’ undergraduate literary studies.
The primary aim of this module is to explore plays both as pieces of prose and verse and as the basis for performance. The module will equip students with the analytical, critical and technical skills necessary both to analyse plays as literary texts and to evaluate performances as theatrical productions of these works. Students will be encouraged furthermore to consider the process of reception and adaptation, whereby plays are refashioned into cinematic or other media.
The module is structured chronologically. It analyses a group of key texts with close reference to genre and mode (comedy, tragedy, the absurd and so on); it examines staging and performance history; and the reception of plays by later writers and filmmakers. These themes will enable students to reflect on the significance, and the shaping effects, of genre, mode, and place on the style and structure of dramatic texts; and to consider the effects of media (and re-mediation) on the meaning and significance of individual plays.
Learning Outcomes
By the end of the module students should be able to:
Analyse a selection of dramatic texts, employing the formal terminology of literary analysis and the technical terminology of theatre production.
Demonstrate understanding of the ways in which dramatic texts are both shaped by, and themselves shape, the mode and genres by which they are categorised (e.g. comedy, tragedy, absurdist, realist);
Identify selected critical and theoretical approaches for the reading of dramatic texts;
Evidence awareness of the media through which plays are produced and consumed (stage, small screen, cinema).
Assessment
27926-01 : 1000 Word Assignment - 1 : Coursework (30%)
27926-03 : 2000 Word Assignment - 2 : Coursework (70%)