A reader with the plays will be available in the second week of the semester.
Leistungsnachweis
regular attendance, writing assignments, a brief oral presentation, and a final paper
Studiengänge (für)
MA 120 Angloamerikanische Literatur, Sprache und Kultur
LAG, LAS Vertiefungsmodul I Theorien, Methoden und Kulturen in nordamerikanischen Literaturen (wahlobl.)
MA, D, LA (alt)
SWS
2
Sonstiges
The course begins in the second week of the semester (October 13).
Today, African American theater is a vital and highly respected part of US American culture. Black playwrights have become constitutive subjects of contemporary US American theater and their plays are performed across the US, especially in New York, as well as abroad and have won numerous prizes. For more than two hundred years, however, black writers experienced great difficulties to stage their plays before a predominantly white audience and black performers were excluded from professional drama or were restricted to stereotypical roles cast by white playwrights.
In this course, we will trace the development of African American drama from its beginnings to the 21st century and, at the same time, touch on issues currently discussed in the emerging discipline Performance Studies. In fact we will begin by exploring the relationship between theater, interpretation, and performance and examine essays written by performance theorists such as Richard Schechner, Bryan Reynolds, and Corinne Kratz. In a next step, we will test the explanatory power of such theoretical approaches to black drama and investigate the playwrights’ major topics, overall achievements, and their political, historical, and artistic concerns. Among the plays we will closely examine are: William Wells Brown, The Escape: or, A Leap for Freedom (1858); Langston Hughes, Don’t You Want to be Free? (1938), Adrienne Kennedy, Funnyhouse of a Negro (1964); August Wilson, Fences (1983); Suzan-Lori Parks, Topdog/Underdog (2001) and possibly Robert Alexander, A Preface to the Alien Garden: A Play About Street Gangs (2001).
This course will be discussion-centered and thus demands both close and careful critical readings of the assigned texts as well as active participation in all class discussions.
