ENG3610 Drama: Psychoanalytic Theory, Albee, O'Neill

This class examines the plays of America’s two most prolific dramatists in conversation with the major theorists of psychoanalysis. Students will leave this course knowing intimately the works of Eugene O’Neill and Edward Albee, as well as the span of psychoanalytic theory, from Freud to Zizek. O’Neill plays we read include: Anna Christie, The Emperor Jones, The Hairy Ape, Strange Interlude, Mourning Becomes Electra, Ah, Wilderness!, The Iceman Cometh, Hughie, Long Day’s Journey Into Night, and A Moon for the Misbegotten. Albee plays we read include: The Zoo Story, The American Dream, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, A Delicate Balance, Seascape, Three Tall Women, The Play About the Baby, and The Goat or Who is Silvia? We will also read critical works by writers such as Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung, Frantz Fanon, Michel Foucault, Luce Irigaray, Jacques Lacan, and Slavoj Zizek.

Credits

4 sh

Course Types

Expression, Literature, Advanced Studies

Course Outcomes

1. Students will:
   1. Read in-depth the plays of Eugene O’Neill and Edward Albee, as well as plays by a number of other writers and a number of essays by major psychoanalytic theorists/critics.
2. 2. Consider how the interpretation of drama differs from the interpretation of other genres of writing.
3. 3. Interpret texts both in discussion and in writing through close reading, intertextual analysis, historical contextualization, and through applied theory.
4. 4. Consider the relationship between theories and texts by adopting different versions of this theoretical lens to examine the works of these 20th century American dramatists.
5. 5. Explore the relationship between the analysis of these plays and the performance of these plays.
6. 6. Draw continuities across the plays of these two writers and the theories that have been labeled “psychoanalytic.”