Course Name: Advanced Critical Theory
Instructor:
SLN: 13582
Meeting Time: MW 2:30-4:50pm
Term: Winter 2018
Advanced Critical Theory
Winter 2018
This course surveys the major critical theories that have informed drama and performance criticism throughout the 20th and 21st centuries. In each unit, we will read foundational critical texts as well as more recent elaborations. For example, for the unit on semiotics, we will read foundational texts on theatre semiotics, as well as Ric Knowles’s 2004 Reading the Material Theatre. This course pursues two objectives: (1) to enhance PhD students’ understanding of critical theory and their ability to use it in their own research; and (2) to make PhD students competent teachers of undergraduate classes in critical theory.
Please buy or borrow the following books:
Peter Barry, Beginning Theory, 3rd edition
Janet Halley, Split Decisions: How and Why to Take a Break from Feminism
Robert Sokolowski, Introduction to Phenomenology
Shannon Jackson, Professing Performance
Catherine Clement, The Lives and Legends of Jacques Lacan
Plays
Athol Fugard, Statements
Gurpreet Kaur Bhatti, Bezhti
Pearl Cleage, A Song for Coretta
Wole Soyinka, Death and the King’s Horseman
David Henry Hwang, M. Butterfly