British and American drama: 1860 to the present.

In this course, we will use both traditional and AI methods to explore Irish drama from the eighteenth to the twenty-first centuries. Working through a series of historical periods, we will consider individual plays in their own right and against their contemporaries by referring to computational analyses of formal and lexical features. We will also consider individual plays in relation to scenes generated by an AI text generator trained on the corpus of Irish drama (other AI systems such as ChatGPT do not have access to much of this material). Throughout the course, we will consider how these plays explore the relation between language and freedom. We will reflect on the relationship between individual and collective identity. While the earlier plays allow us to think about the role of drama in a colonial context, the more recent plays allow us to think about the dramatic medium at a moment in which individual subjectivity and collective life are increasingly routed through and constituted by digital space. This course was pioneered in Spring 2021 with the help of Professor David Bamman from the School of Information. The Spring 2024 iteration is developed with the help of Kent Chang from the School of Information. Experience of programing is not necessary for this course. However, if you wish to develop a working knowledge of Jupyter notebooks and Python, you will be able to sign up for workshops on Google Collab or at the D-lab, for which you will receive extra credit. Assignments will take the form of two short papers and one longer creative project in which you write a short play using lines from plays on the syllabus, AI generated material, and text of your own.

Repeat Rules

Course is not repeatable for credit.

Requirements class fulfills