Drama

• Drama: A short history [5th Century BCE (Greeks)]
• This is where we started western transitions
• Drama


  • Based on ceremony, rituals, faith, and free will
  • Earliest plays focused on humanity and peoples' struggles with the Gods or bigger issues
  • Intended to focus on good and evil
  • Didactic
• Satire plays


  • This genre expanded
  • The plays dealt with absurdity
• Middle Ages


  • Greek times slowly disappeared
  • Plays were often religious
  • Perform miracle plays
  • Didactic to teach Christianity and marriage
  • Can have a passion for play (ex., passion about Christ)
  • Morality play (allegories): highly religious (usually an actor would act as a virtue or vice)
• The important thing about plays is that they are playing for a non-illiterate crowd
• Renaissance


  • Reintroduction for Greek plays, styles, forms, and topics
  • Dramas were absolutely flourished
• Types of Genre of Dramas

  • Tragic/ tragedies
  • Comedies
  • Myth plays
• Restoration (17th Century)


  • Comedy of manners (responds to puritans): focuses on upper classes
  • Much more gentle (it deals with plays in a manner way)
• Puritans


  A group of English Protestants in the late 16th and 17th centuries who sought to purify the Church of England
• Sentimental Comedy (18th Century)

  • Dialogue is sweet and sentimental
  • Plays about the past were about elevated kings and the upper class, and then they started to include the middle class
• 19th to 20th Century

  • Modernism
  • Existentialism
  • Urbanization
  • Psychological
  • Expansion in the form of content
  • Experimentation
  • Problem Play: they address social or individual problems
  • They address feminism (ex., Trifles by Susan Glaspell)
• Modern plays


  • Trifles
  • Raisin in the Sun
• Trifles


  About misogyny and feminism
• Raisin in the Sun


  About impoverishment
• Lens


  • We can look at literature and art production quite specifically (text, art, a pair of shoes, or any part of production)
• Assumptions


  • We assume certain things, and they focus on particular aspects of the text
• Moral Criticism (Greek)


  • Plato: Assumes that all of art is nothing but a mere of nature (literature, plastic art is a mere of nature)
  • Art, no matter what it takes in, is destructive unless it teaches mortality or theoretical lessons
  • Aristotle's "Poetics": All means and art are a mere to end (it is purposeful)
  • Meant to invoke Katharasis (Pity or Fear)
• New Criticism (interiority)


  • A theory that suggests a major
  • A primary assumption that art reveals itself (a text will tell you how it should be read)
  • Effective Fallacy: the reader can never tell us what it is about because everyone reads texts in different ways
  • Intentional Fallacy: we cannot derive the meaning of the text from the author
• New Historicism (exteriority)


  • Understanding something by taking its text into its historical context
• Psychoanalytical Criticism (Southern Gothic)

  • We can read the text psychoanalytical (this is an assumption)
• Feminist Theory


  • Social Feminism: is what we march and what we do
  • Academic Feminsim (Critique)
  • Lens: it looks at the way literature or any other cultural products (music, literature, art) create and contribute to or undermine the economic, political, social, and psychological oppression of women
  • Marginalization of Women: left out of literary canon
  • Assumptions: Women have been oppressed throughout history. Patriarchy is the Mechanism that took
  • Whenever patriarchy exists, women are marginalized. Women are often known in a relationship with men despite their differences
  • All Western society is deeply rooted in patriarchal ideology (it is pervasive and everywhere) → It is subtle
  • Sex (male and female) is biological, but culture determines gender
  • All feminist activities: if you consider yourself as a feminist, all feminist activied engaged in equality
  • Gender plays a part in all of human experience and production, even when it is subconscious
• "Sisterhood"


  • An idea that comes from a second wave of feminism
  • The only way to escape male patriarchy was to unite and form some kind of solidarity. The only way it can save women is to find ways that connect them, find common experiences and use that