This course is a small, faculty-led seminar on the practice and discipline of literary analysis. It is meant for all students who seek an introductory literature course and would like to improve their ability to read and write critically, including those who may wish to major in English. Focusing on the close study of a few works, rather than a survey of many, the seminar will help students develop college-level skills for interpreting literature, while gaining awareness of different strategies and approaches for making sense of literary language, genres, forms, and contexts. The seminar also will develop students’ ability to write about literature and to communicate meaningfully the stakes of their analysis to an audience.

The work of this class will be to understand the drama as literature in company. Lots of other literary forms make claims about what social life is like, and strive to act upon the social life of their readers beyond the reading experience. But the drama is itself sociable. It assembles a company of actors and stage hands to make itself happen, and enfolds with them a whole new company-- the audience-- as it happens. Even if we read a playscript in solitude, even if it's the script of a play that has never been acted, the form of the text reminds us that it is written against solitude--it calls us to invest the speeches we read in human bodies, charting with their words and movements a space in which the play is happening. We'll move back and forth between active reading of playtexts and play-going at local theaters as the semester progresses. Our reading will focus on a few crucial concepts for the analysis of drama--the tragic choice, the workings of space and illusion, spectacle, character, prop-- using both primary dramatic texts and some classic literary studies. About half of the primary texts will be important prototypes from earlier periods--ancient Greece and Renaissance England-- and the rest will come from the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

Book List:

Chekhov, Anton: Uncle Vanya;

Suh,Lloyd: The Heart Sellers;

Wilson: August: Two Trains Running;

Norton Anthology of Drama, Shorter Edition

Repeat Rules

Course is not repeatable for credit.

Requirements class fulfills