Please Note: This course is one of two parts, however, neither part requires the other as a prerequisite. Students may enroll in both courses or select just one without missing materials needed to enjoy the course’s content.
This course explores world renowned drama of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries by recipients of the Nobel Prize in Literature: Wole Soyinka (1987), Dario Fo (1997), Gao Xingjian (2000), Elfriede Jelinek (2004), and Harold Pinter (2005). Students will read one play a week prior to each class: Death and the King’s Horsemen, Accidental Death of an Anarchist, The Other Shore, The Exterminating Angel, and Betrayal. Lectures will include overviews of the playwrights’ careers, close readings of the plays, their socio-political contexts, and theatre aesthetics. In-class screenings and actor dramatizations will complement the readings.
