THEATRE IN ENGLISH LANGUAGE

This third-year course aims to perfect the skills gained in the first two years of the BA course in Lingue, Civiltà e Scienze del Linguaggio (literary and cultural path) and to strengthen the students’ basic knowledge of the history of English literature, theatre, and culture.
Students will engage with one of the most important playwrights in contemporary theatre, and develop a sense of the literary, socio-political and philosophical issues associated with his works. They will enhance their skills in textual analysis and in relating the dramatic texts to theatrical practice, as well as to the historical and cultural contexts of the second half of the twentieth century.

The course aims to improve the students’ ability to use analytic instruments and methods, as well as to make autonomous judgements, also in view of the writing of their BA dissertation and of further study.

Classes will be held in English. Students must therefore be able to understand and critically discuss dramatic and cultural topics of the English twentieth century.
Students are recommended to read the plays listed in the programme before the beginning of the course.

Tom Stoppard
The course will deal with the dramatic production of one of the leading playwrights of our times. His plays stage philosophical, scientific, as well as aesthetic debates, besides being creative rereadings and rewritings of traditional intellectual and literary materials. Students will read the following plays:
Travesties, After Magritte, Artist descending a staircase, Arcadia, the Real Thing.

Primary texts:
Tom Stoppard, Travesties, After Magritte, Artist descending a staircase, Arcadia, The Real Thing (any edition).

Criticism:
For the exam students will have to choose three texts out of the following list:

Michael Billington, Stoppard: the Playwright, London-New York, Methuen, 1987.
Tim Brassell, Tom Stoppard: an Assessment, London, Macmillan, 1985.
Richard Corballis, Stoppard: the mistery and the clockwork, London-New York, Methuen, 1984.
Anthony Jenkins, The Theatre of Tom Stoppard, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1989.
Daniel Keath Jerrigan, Tom Stoppard: Bucking the Postmodern, London, McFarland & Co., 2012.
Katherine E. Kelly, Tom Stoppard and the Craft of Comedy: Medium and Genre at Play, Ann Arbor, University of Michigan Press, 1991.
Neil Sammells, Tom Stoppard: the Artist as Critic, Basingstoke, Macmillan Press, 1988.
Tom Stoppard in Conversation, edited by P. Delaney, The Un. Of Michigan Press

Useful for Travesties and Arcadia: Jim Hunter, Tom Stoppard, Faber Critical Guides

Students will have to sit an oral exam to prove they know both the primary and the secondary texts of the programme. They will also have to show they have acquired 1) a good knowledge of the theatrical context of the second half of the twentieth century; 2) the capacity to use appropriate tools of textual analysis, and 3) the skills to make autonomous judgments on the texts analyzed.
The exam will be in English.

15 two-hour classes, one per week.

English

Students unable to attend at least 2/3 of the course, shall choose five critical texts instead of three.

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