الفصل الدراسي الأول

Modern Criticism moves from focusing on the author to focusing on the text itself and then to the reader and society; it begins with T.S. Eliot who argued that poetry is impersonal and that tradition is a living order which the individual talent must join, then Russian Formalism and New Criticism made the literary text autonomous through close reading, rejecting authorial intention and emotional effect to analyze irony, paradox and ambiguity, after which Structuralism treated literature as a system of signs with binary oppositions, while Post-structuralism and Deconstruction (Derrida, late Barthes) declared the death of the author and the instability of meaning and finally external approaches returned: Reader-Response gave power to the reader, Psychoanalytic read texts as unconscious dreams, Marxist as expressions of class ideology, Feminist which developed from imitation to revolt with the slogan "the personal is political" and Woolf's demand for money and a room of one's own, to Gynocriticism, and Post-colonial (Said) which critiques how the West constructed the East as the Other.

In this drama course students will study one more famous tragedy of the genius universal English playwright William Shakespeare, Macbeth (1606). They will also be introduced to modern drama by studying two sample plays, The Shadow of a Gunman (1923) and Juno and the Paycock (1924), written by the well-known Irish playwright Sean O’Casey. They will, furthermore, increase their knowledge of some important dramatic terms.