Programme

Performing Arts - Actors Training

Level of Qualification|Semesters|ECTS

Bachelor | Semestral | 4

Year | Type of course unit | Language

1 |Mandatory |Português

Total of Working Hours | Duration of Contact (hours)

100 | 45

Code

ULP1977-15439

Recommended complementary curricular units

n/a

Mode of study

Face-to-face

Precedences

Não

Professional Internship

Não

Syllabus

1. A dramatic reading (the 49 steps of reading)
1.1. Why read the classics?
2. Reading Greek tragedies: some prior questions
2.1. The classical Greece
2.2. The concepts of tragedy and comedy
2.3. Tragic categories: liberty and necessity; blame and fate; awareness and ignorance
2.4. The ¿death of tragedy¿ thesis and the modern attempts for its revitalization
3. Reading plays of the tragic corpus
3.1. Sophocles, Oedipus Rex: Blindness and insight
3.2. Sophocles, Antigone: The appearance of the discourse of power
3.3. Euripides, Medea: Divine and human in tragedy
3.4. Aeschylus, Agamemnon: Crime and punishment ¿ and judgment

Objectives

Caught between the ¿paradoxical historicity¿ (Jesi) of the myth and the emerging logos, Tragedy occupies a short period in Greek cultural history. Understanding the richness of such a period and its fecundity is the first objective. Reading these tragedies will also allow a renewed perception of what constitutes the dramatic form as it has prorromped in its singularity and its role in human societies. Students are invited to a wider understanding of human behaviour, both as anthropological and psychic experience revealed through the dramatic text. Students should become fairly capable of reading Greek tragedies, not as an alien literary tradition, but as a literary form capable of reaching today's emotions and doubts. Finally, they'll be able to hold tragic text relevant to their own historical and individual experience.

Knowledge, abilities and skills to be acquired

To improve reading, analyses and commentary skills. To promote critical thinking and argumentation. To ensure knowledge of the founding texts of the Western dramatic tradition and of its historical and cultural context. To acquire a sense of the formal aspects, whether literary or dramaturgical, of the ancient Greek tragedies. To learn to project the experience of these works in contemporary contexts.

Teaching methodologies and assessment

Collective reading of the proposed texts. Plight of the issues reaised and their submission to debate. Recourse to supplementary sources (other dramatic texts, films, records of performances). Lectures by the teacher in order to frame or summarize the activities described.
The assessment shall be based on reading assignements done in class as well as on brief written exercises (50%). At the end of the semester, students will also undergo a written exam (50%).

References

Ativa:
Sófocles. Rei Édipo. Trad. Maria do Céu Fialho. Lisboa: Edições 70, 2006.
Sófocles. Antígona. Trad. Marta Várzeas. V.N. Famalicão: Húmus, 2010.
Eurípides. Medeia. Trad. Maria Helena da Rocha Pereira. Lisboa: Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian, 2005.
Ésquilo. Oresteia. Trad. Manuel Oliveira Pulquério. Lisboa: Edições 70, 1990.
Passiva:
Aristóteles, Poética. Trad. Ana Maria Valente. Lisboa: Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian, 2015.
Hall, Edith. Greek Tragedy: Suffering Under the Sun. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010.
Kitto, H.D.F., Greek Tragedy: A Literary Study. London/New York: Routledge, 2011.
Pereira, Maria Helena da Rocha. Estudos de História da Cultura Clássica ¿ I Volume. Lisboa: Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian, 1964.
Segal, Charles. Sophocles' Tragic World. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998.
Scodel, Ruth. An Introduction to Greek Tragedy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011.
Steiner, George. The Death of Tragedy. New York: Oxford University Press, 1961.