Sunday, January 23, 2011

Story-telling

Aside from the story I am trying to tell in my novel, I also have a story to tell in each of the two classes I'm teaching this semester. I'll post the novel syllabus tomorrow after the first class has met, I think; I still need to put together the course reader for that and drop it off at the xerox shop in the next day or two.

The reader for the drama course is done, though; I dropped it off around 8pm on Friday night after a rather frenzied day of running around town. In addition to these required books (that's about eight plays altogether) and various stuff that we'll read online through the Columbia library system (including DNB entries for Garrick and Colley Cibber and a good chunk of Cibber's landmark autobiography), the reader includes these materials:

Erving Goffman, chapter one (“Performances”), The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (New York: Anchor Doubleday, [1959]), 17-76.

William Wycherley, The Plain Dealer (1677), from The Plays of William Wycherley, ed. Peter Holland (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1981).

Aphra Behn, The Second Part of the Rover (1681), from The Works of Aphra Behn, ed. Janet Todd, vol. 6: The Plays, 1678-1682 (London: William Pickering, 1996).

William Congreve, Love for Love (1694), from The Complete Plays of William Congreve, ed. Herbert Davis (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1967).

John Dryden, All for Love: or, The World Well Lost (1678), from The Works of John Dryden, vol. 13: Plays (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1985).

Excerpts on acting styles given in David Thomas and Arnold Hare, eds., Restoration and Georgian England, 1660-1778 (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989), pp. 166-173 and 341-358.

[David Garrick], An Essay on Acting (London: W. Bickerton, 1746).

Denis Diderot, “Paradox on Acting,” in Diderot’s Selected Writings, ed. Lester G. Crocker, trans. Derek Coltman (New York: Macmillan, 1966), 318-329.

Joseph Roach, chapter two (“Nature Still, But Nature Mechanized”), The Player’s Passion: Studies in the Science of Acting (1985; rpt. Ann Arbor: Michigan University Press, 1993), 58-92.

Marcel Mauss, “Techniques of the Body,” in Techniques, Technology and Civilisation, ed. Nathan Schlanger (New York and Oxford: Durkheim Press/Berghahn Books, 2009), pp. 77-95.

Peter Holland, “Hearing the Dead: The Sound of David Garrick,” in Players, Playwrights, Playhouses: Investigating Performance, 1660-1800, ed Michael Cordner and Peter (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 248-270.

David Garrick, The Country Girl (1766), from The Plays of David Garrick, Vol. 7: Garrick’s Own Plays, 1757-1773, ed. Harry William Pedicord (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1982).

David Garrick, The Jubilee (1769), from The Plays of David Garrick, Vol. 2: Garrick's Own Plays, 1767 – 1775, ed. Harry William Pedicord and Fredrick Louis Bergmann (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1980).

2 comments:

  1. Are students expected to have read Antony and Cleopatra?

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  2. It is a good question, but no - I will ask them to read act I, just to make sure they have the feel and flavor of structural choices and language, but I imagine most of them won't know it beforehand.

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