Learning Outcomes:

Engage with modern and postmodern theatre
Acquire vocabulary to deal with a range of contemporary performances
Experienced a range of different approaches to contemporary performance
Have explored responses to non-text based theatre

Indicative Module Content:

Indicative Only--Subject to Change
Class 1: Introduction: Modernisms, Postmoderism, Postcolonialism, and Identity politics
Class 2: End of Master Narratives: Samuel Beckett’s Endgame
Class 3: Pastiche, Parody, and Postmodern Politics: Heiner Müller’s Hamletmachine
Class 4: Anti-representation: Peter Handke’s Offending the Audience
Class 5: Orientalism: David Hwang’s M. Butterfly
Class 6: Race and Representation: Branden Jacobs-Jenkins
Week 7: Performing the Archive: The Wooster Group’s Hamlet
Spring Recess
Week 8: Crisis, Hope and the Utopian Performative: debbie tucker green’s random
Week 9: Writing, History, and Death: Suzan-Lori Parks’s The Death of The Last Black Man in the Entire World
Week 10: The Death of Character/Postdramatic Theatre: Sarah Kane’s 4.48 Psychosis
Week 11: Memory, Trauma, Abstraction: The Brokentalkers’ Blue Boy
Week 12: TBA + Conclusions/Essay Prep

Student Effort Type	Hours
Lectures	12
Small Group	10
Autonomous Student Learning	78
Total	100

Not applicable to this module.

Not applicable to this module.
 

Assessment Strategy  

Description	Timing		Component Scale		% of Final Grade
Essay: End of semester essay. Students will write a end-of-term research essay.	Week 12	n/a	Graded	No	55
Assignment: Mid-semester performance analysis. Students will attend or view online a theatrical performance and write a performance analysis based on the theoretical readings from the module	Unspecified	n/a	Graded	No	35
Attendance: Attendance and preparatory tasks: Students will submit preparatory tasks based on weekly readings.	Varies over the Trimester	n/a	Graded	No	10

 

Resit In	Terminal Exam
Autumn	No

• Feedback individually to students, post-assessment

Students will receive written feedback post-assessment and have opportunity for individual feedback.

A Postmodern Reader / edited by Joseph Natoli and Linda Hutcheon (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993)
Birringer, Johannes, Theatre, Theory, Postmodernism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993).
Brooker, Peter (ed.), Modernism/Postmodernism (London: Longman, 1992).
Fischer-Lichte, Erika, The Show and the Gaze: A European Perspective, (Iowa City : University of Iowa Press, 1997)
Fortier, Mark Theory/Theatre; An Introduction (London: Routledge, 2002).
Fuchs, Elinor, The Death of Character : Perspectives on Theater after Modernism (Bloomington : Indiana University Press, c1996.
Hutcheon, Linda, The Politics of Postmodernism, (London: Routledge, 1989)
Jameson, Fredric, Postmodernism: or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (London: Verso, 1991)
Kaye, Nick, Postmodernism and Performance (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1994).
Lehmann, Hans Thies, transl. Karen Juers-Munby, Postdramatic Theatre, (London and New York: Routledge, 2006).
Lyotard, Jean-François, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge (Manchester : Manchester University Press, 1984)
Zarrilli, Phillip, et all., Theatre Histories: An Introduction (London: Routledge, 2006).

Samuel Beckett’s Endgame
Heiner Müller’s Hamletmachine
Martin Crimp, Attempts on Her Life
Peter Handke, Offending the Audience
Hwang, David, M. Butterfly.
Kushner, Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes, Part 1: Millennium
Suzan-Lori Parks, The Death of The Last Black Man in the Entire World
Sarah Kane’s 4.48 Psychosis