ENGL 224
American Drama: Hidden Knowledge Fall 2019
Division I
Cross-listed AMST 275 / COMP 275 / THEA 275
This is not the current course catalog

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The Buddha is said to have identified three things that cannot stay hidden: the sun, the moon, and the truth. What’s the secret? Who is lying? Who is breaking the rules? American drama abounds with hidden knowledge and false representations. (This is not surprising: theatre is always on some level a deceptive practice, a place where one person pretends to be another, and where what is spoken is always open to skeptical scrutiny. We might say theatre is always lying as much as lying is always theatre.) This tutorial course will examine what lies hidden in American plays from the late nineteenth century to the early twenty-first. Beginning with excerpted critical and historical writings on secrecy and lying (The Adventures of Pinocchio, Machiavelli’s The Prince, Thomas Carlson’s Lying and Deception: Theory and Practice, among others), we will proceed to a set of American plays from across a wide spectrum of playwrights, including Eugene O’Neill, Edward Albee, Sarah Ruhl, Arthur Miller, Amy Herzog, Susan Glaspell, Sophie Treadwell, Annie Baker, and others. Student papers will explore how hidden knowledge structures dramatic action, how different characters create and respond to untruths, and what can we learn in particular from American drama about a national relationship to honesty and its opposites.
The Class: Format: tutorial
Limit: 10
Expected: 10
Class#: 1833
Grading: no pass/fail option, no fifth course option
Requirements/Evaluation: weekly papers/response papers; weekly meeting with instructor and tutorial partner
Prerequisites: none
Enrollment Preferences: Theatre and English majors
Distributions: Division I
Notes: This course is cross-listed and the prefixes carry the following divisional credit:
AMST 275 Division II COMP 275 Division I ENGL 224 Division I THEA 275 Division I
Attributes: AMST Arts in Context Electives

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