American dreams? Monetized bodies, terror, and trauma in American Drama

Learning Outcomes

Learning Outcomes

Having successfully completed this module you will be able to:

• the relationship between playwrights and a number of theatre companies and directors
• the generic and formal strategies used by modern American playwrights

Cognitive Skills

Having successfully completed this module you will be able to:

• consider plays dramaturgically, reading them as texts for performance
• engage productively and reflectively with existing scholarship and draw on a variety of critical approaches to explore the crucial issues informing American drama of this period

This module delves into the complexities and contradictions of American identity(ies) and American society(ies), and ponders their national and inter-national ramifications as represented, criticized, and resisted in dramatic literature. Seminars will focus on the development of one playwright’s work and social thinking, or on one political/ethical issue and several dramatists’ response to it. It is hoped that the texts will emerge as elements in a set of evolving national debates.

The module will be organised chronologically, moving from the playwrights of the Eisenhower era to the present day: topics explored will include modern warfare and simulatory power; gender; genetics; psychology; global capitalism.

Teaching and learning methods

Teaching methods include:

• background lectures
• seminars
• independent study
• screenings of plays and films
• workshops

Learning activities include:

• close reading and careful analysis of selected texts and themes
• engagement in seminar discussions as participator, practitioner, and listener
• participation in group presentations and group readings/performances
• preparation for and completion of two coursework essays

This module includes a Learning Support Hour. This is a flexible weekly contact hour, designed to support and respond to the particular cohort taking the module from year to year. This hour will include (but not be limited to) activities such as language, theory and research skills classes; group work supervisions; assignment preparation and essay writing guidance; assignment consultations; feedback and feed-forward sessions.

Resources & Reading list

Textbooks

Marc Maufort (1995). Staging Difference: Cultural Pluralism in American Theater and Drama. New York: Peter Lang.

Jan Cohen-Cruz (2005). Local Acts: Community-Based Performance in the U.S.. New Brunswick, New Jersey, London: Rutgers UP.

Dominic Dromgoole (2000). The Full Room. London: Methuen.

Ruby Cohn (1995). Anglo-American Interplay in Recent Drama. Cambridge University Press.

S.E. Wilmer (2004). Theater, Society and the Nation: Staging American Identities. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Alison Forsyth and Chris Megson (2009). Get Real: Documentary Theater Past and Present. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

Jill Dolan (2005). The Feminist Spectator as Critic. University of Michigan Press.

Martin Middeken, Peter Paul Schnierer et al. (2014). The Methuen Drama Guide to Contemporary American Playwrights. London, NY: Bloomsbury.

(2010). Engaging Performance: Theater as Call and Response. NY: Routledge.

Carol Martin (2010). Dramaturgy of the Real on the World Stage. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

David Edgar (1999). State of Play. London: Faber.

Kerstin Schmidt (2005). The Theater of Transformation Postmodernism in American Drama. Rodopi.

Jeffrey H. Richards and Heather S. Nathans, eds. (2014). The Oxford Handbook of American Drama. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Angela C. Pao (2010). No Safe Spaces: Re-Casting Race, Ethnicity, and Nationality in American Theatre. University of Michigan Press.

Annette J Saddik (2007). Contemporary American Drama. Edinburgh University Press.

Christopher B. Balme (2008). The Cambridge Introduction to Theater Studies. Cambridge: Cambridge UP.

L. Bailey Mcdanie (2013). Constructing Maternal Performance in Twentieth-Century American Drama. Palgrave: Macmillan.

David Krasner (2005). A Companion to Twentieth-Century American Drama. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing.

Summative

This is how we’ll formally assess what you have learned in this module.

Referral

This is how we’ll assess you if you don’t meet the criteria to pass this module.

Repeat Information

Repeat type: Internal & External