Introduction to drama

Lectures: 2 sessions / week, 1.5 hours / session

There are no prerequisites for this course.

Drama is a word we get from the Greeks, and it means something that has to be performed, not read or recited. So it's odd that we read and study performance texts at all. Yet the idea of drama is so much a part of cultural self-awareness that we can't seem to escape it: acting, performing, and watching are natural to us now. But it was the theatre that first held the mirror up to our nature, making us see ourselves as representable, and this recognition led to new kinds of storytelling. This course explores the theatricality of experience in drama from our earliest surviving texts to the present, including both Eastern and Western traditions. Students will have the opportunity to perform scenes from the works we study, and to review a performance of their choice.

This is a HASS CI-H or Communication-Intensive course. Thus the course content is both introductory and broad, while the classroom work emphasizes reading, writing and performing—as speaker, listener, and social / dramatic actor. (See the participation requirement, below.) These courses require us to produce 5000 words of writing in 3-5 assignments, a revision, and resubmission of at least one assignment, and an assessed oral component. Note that a 5-page paper is around 1250 words.

At the end of the course, the student will have a general overview of dramatic movements and ideas across countries and historical periods, a sense of how to write about these ideas in relation to specific texts, and a sense of why drama matters to them.

Brecht, Bertolt. "Three Cheers for Shaw." Chapter 4 in Brecht on Theatre: The Development of an Aesthetic. 13th edition. Edited and translated by John Willett. Hill and Wang, 1977. ISBN: 9780809005420.

Cixous, Hélène. "Aller à la mer." Modern Drama 27, no. 4 (1984): 546–8. (Translated by Barbara Kerslake)

Elam, Keir. "Foundations: Signs in the Theatre." Chapter 2 in The Semiotics of Theatre and Drama. 2nd edition. Routledge, 2002. ISBN: 9780415280181.

Oxford Dictionaries. Paperback Oxford English Dictionary. 7th ed. Oxford University Press, 2013. ISBN: 9780199640942.
*This will be an important resource as you work out the language of your texts for close readings.

The Plays of Roswitha: Dulcitius, Internet History Sourcebooks Project, Fordham University.

Worthen, W. B. Wadsworth Anthology of Drama, Brief Sixth Edition. Wadsworth Cengage Learning, 2010. ISBN: 9781428288157.

For more information, see the table in the Readings section.

Attendance and participation in all classes

Note: Participation means offering questions and comments in every class. If you don't like to talk, use the opening discussion period and your weekly writing to help you prepare something. Attention to each other is essential for this--laptops and phones should not be out unless we are doing research or reading online texts

For more information on the activities in the table above, see the Assignments section.

Plagiarism—the use of another's intellectual work without acknowledgement—is a serious offense. It is the policy of the Literature Faculty that students who plagiarize will receive an F in the subject, and that the instructor will forward the case to the Committee on Discipline. Full acknowledgement for all information obtained from sources outside the classroom must be clearly stated in all written work submitted and in all oral presentations, including images or texts in other media and for materials collected online. All ideas, arguments, and direct phrasings taken from someone else's work must be identified and properly footnoted. Quotations from other sources must be clearly marked as distinct from the student's own work. For further guidance on the proper forms of attribution, consult the style guides available in the Writing and Communication Center at MIT, and in Academic Integrity at MIT: A Handbook for Students.

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