Università Roma Tre

Poetry and Drama in Contemporary Anglophone America: USA, Caribbean, Canada (2nd part)
As categories of literary compositions, literary genres are naturally flexible and open to blending and hybridization. Poetry and drama, in particular, share specific characteristics and often impregnate each other with lyricism and performative qualities. We need only to address the work of modernist poets, the beat and post-modernist generation, great dramatists and post-modern authors of different ethnicities and gender to discover how often those genres mingle to create new subversive blurring. We will aim at reaching an adequate understanding of the significance of genre in contemporary literature.
Among the authors: W.C. Williams, Kenneth Patchen, Diane Di Prima, Sylvia Plath, Seamus Heaney, Derek Walcott, Bob Dylan, E. Albee, Erin Shields, Djanet Sears, Toni Morrison, Colum McCann.

Texts
American Buffalo (based on David Mamet’s play)
Glengarry Glen Ross (based on David Mamet’s play)
The Winslow Boy (based on Rattigan’s play)
China Doll
Bibliography: critical approach of
Christopher Bigsby, "A Critical Introduction to Twentieth-Century American Drama", Vol. III (Cambridge UP, 2004)
and
Philip French, “David Mamet and Film,” in Bigsby, The Cambridge Companion to David Mamet (Cambridge UP, 2004): 171-193.
A choice of essays, downloadable from the internet, will be proposed to the students.

The students can choose texts from the different editions. Biblioteca Petrocchi keeps most of them, retrievable through "discovery".