CONTEXT OF CLASSICAL GREECE

Originated some 27 centuries ago in 7th

century BCE. Were staged during the

spring festival to honor the god

Dionysus.

MAIN CHARACTERISTICS

• The theater in which ancient Greek plays were performed was an outdoor,

open-air complex with seats arranged around the center stage in tiers.

• Playwrights presented tragedies and comedies during the three days of

Dionysus festival

• Thespis first had the idea to add a speaking actor to performances of choral

song and dance. The term Thespian (or actor) derives from his name.

• Competitive- prizes awarded

• Choral - singing seems to have been an important part a chorus of men,

many think the choral song -- dithyramb-- was the beginnings of Greek drama

(but origins are unclear).

• Closely associated with religion - stories based on myth or history

Aeschylus

The Orestia

Sophocles

Edipo rey

REPRESENTATIVE AUTHORS AND TITLES

Euripides

Orestes

CONTEXT OF CLASSICAL ROME

Refers to the time period of theatrical practice

and performance in Rome beginning in the

4th century B.C., following the state’s

transition from Monarchy to Republic.

MAIN CHARACTERISTICS

• Theater of the era is generally separated into the genres of

tragedy and comedy.

• The Romans took theater, like all things, from the Greek.

• The Roman theater was a method of absorbing the public into

stories and ideas that gave a religious sanction to the society and

its expansion.

• Roman theater could take either dramatic or comedic forms.

Both served a social purpose as a way of "Romanizing" the

spectators or acting as a catharsis for social pressures and

problems.

• Drama had a tendency to reflect Roman problems and political

issues, safely symbolized in dramatic forms.

• Comedy was more social and less political or military.

• Performances often featured men as good fathers whose

character flaws developed out of devotion rather than ignorance.

Titus Maccius Plautus

The Asses

Terence

Andria

REPRESENTATIVE AUTHORS AND TITLES

Seneca

Myth of Thyestes

CONTEXT

It arose throughout Europe from the fall of the

Roman Empire to the Renaissance in the

fifteenth century.

MAIN CHARACTERISTICS

• Anonymous Author

• Frequent use of verse

• Use of Latin

• Dissemination of national languages

• Religious character of much of the literary works

• Epic Caballeresca

• Tales and Fables

Gonzalo de Berceo

Sacrificio de la misa

Jorge Manrique

Coplas

REPRESENTATIVE AUTHORS AND TITLES

Caedmon

The dream of the holy rood

CONTEXT

began in the 1300s and co-existed with the Middle

Ages/Medieval Thinking. The Renaissance did not

dominate until the 16th.

Italy was the powerhouse of the Renaissance.

MAIN CHARACTERISTICS

• One of the most important details is the use of the mask in the performances

• It was an improvised theater.

• It was done outdoors.

• It was a popular theater (linked to the traditions of each religion).

• The theater at that time is represented for the nobility. La Celestina was one of the most outstanding and well-known works of the Renaissance.

• In all works, the idea is that man is perfectible, he is an unbounded, flexible being who knows how to develop each one of his abilities.

• The theater was one of the main diversions of the town in the Renaissance, the performances were represented in places located in the center of the cities called "Corrales de Comedia" where the performances lasted between two hours and average and three hours approximately.

Philip Sidney

Astrophel and Stella

REPRESENTATIVE AUTHORS AND TITLES

Thomas More

Utopia

Francis Bacon

New Atlantis

CONTEXT

Extended from Italy to the rest of

Europe in the seventeenth century.

MAIN CHARACTERISTICS

• Beauty predominates

• Tragicomedy

• Rule of the 3 units.

• The division into acts

• Language adapted to the social and cultural class of the

character

• Metric

• The importance of rhetorical figures

• Moorish, pastoral, chivalric, mythological themes, liturgical

matters, biblical themes.

Miguel de Cervantes

Don Quixote

Francisco de Quevedo

A una nariz

REPRESENTATIVE AUTHORS AND TITLES

Lope de Vega

El perro de hortelano

CONTEXT

Was born in the mid-1700s, originally in Rome but its

popularity exploded in France.

MAIN CHARACTERISTICS

• Neoclassical literature was written in a period where social

order was undergoing tremendous changes.

• In the so called Enlightenment Period, people believed that

natural passions aren't necessarily good; natural passions must

be subordinated to social needs and be strictly controlled.

• Authors believed that reason was the primary basis of authority.

They believed that social needs are more important than

individual needs and that man could find meaning in order -

religious, social, the order of nature, government and literary

forms.

REPRESENTATIVE AUTHORS AND TITLES

Happy The Man

by John Dryden

Sound And Sense

by Alexander Pope

MacFlecknoe

Shadwell

CONTEXT

Romanticism was a literary movement that

swept through virtually every country of

Europe, the United States, and Latin America

that lasted from about 1750 to 1870.

MAIN CHARACTERISTICS

• The Romantic period was based on emotion, adventure

and imagination. The name "romantic" itself comes from

the term "romance" which is a genre of prose or poetic

heroic narrative originating in medieval literature.

• Romanticism reached beyond the rational and Classicist

ideal models to elevate medievalism and elements of art

and narrative perceived to be authentically medieval.

• The individual emotions, feelings, and expressions of

artists.

• It rejected rigid forms and structures. Instead, it placed

great stress on the individual, unique experience of an

artist/writer.

REPRESENTATIVE AUTHORS AND TITLES

Infant Joy

By William Blake

A Red, Red Rose

by Robert Burns

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Christable and Kubla Khan

CONTEXT

Began in the 19th-century theatre, around the

1870s, and remained present through much

of the 20th century. Russia's first professional

playwright, Aleksey Pisemsky, along with Leo

Tolstoy, began a tradition of psychological

realism in Russia.

MAIN CHARACTERISTICS

• Trasparent lenguage

• Objective views of reality through the study of customs of psychological character. Any subjective element is eliminated, as well as any fantastic event and emotion that derives from reality.

• Defense of a thesis: each narrator write his works from his own moral point of view, even though it may compromise the objectivity of the narrative. This is called omniscient narrator.

• Issues which are close to the reader: like conflicts in marriage, infidelity, defense of one's ideals...

• Use of colloquial language: the language spoken by the characters has to be as similar as possible to the language they might use in real life, so as not to detract from the veracity of the novel.

Samuel Clemens

Mississippi

Bret Harte

The Luck

REPRESENTATIVE AUTHORS AND TITLES

Kate Chopin

The Awakening

CONTEXT

Is a movement in European drama and theatre that

developed in the late 19th and early 20th centuries

MAIN CHARACTERISTICS

• Physiology as the cause to the character's conduct.

• Satire and social criticism: naturalist novels aren't simply a pastime, they're a

seriously detailed study of social problems, and it tried to find the causes.

• Understanding of literature as a weapon for political, philosophical and social

combat.

• Topics can revolve around social illnesses and other disagreeable aspects of

life, so the Naturalist writers can't hesitate when writing about the most crude

and unpleasant things of social life.

• Adoption of sex-related topics as the central element in novels as a

manifestation of a social illness and vices. This is why so many Naturalist

works talk about prostitution as a social evil and individual tragedy.

Stephen Crane

Maggie

Edith Wharton

Ethan Frome

REPRESENTATIVE AUTHORS AND TITLES

Frank Norris

Mc Teague

CONTEXT

Is a post-world War II designation for particular

plays of absurdist fiction written by a number

of primarily European playwrights in the late

1950s, as well as one for the style of theatre

which has envolved from their work.

MAIN CHARACTERISTICS

• Investigation of the relativity of truth

• Futility

• Humanity´s vain struggle against fate

• Inadequacy of communication

• Use of small talk and understatement

• Non- sequiturs

• Instability of characters/ lack of definite characterization

• Lack of definite plot structure

• World bent on destruction

• The absurdity of attempting to control one´s fate

• Absurdist fiction uses satire, dark humor, irrationality, and agnostic or nihilistic

themes to explore the human experience of incompleteness or meaninglessness. It

also looks at the range of human responses to meaninglessness, including

escapism, religiosity, and the conscious construction of a personal purpose.

Edward Albee

The Zoo Story

Albert Camus

The myth of Sisyphus

REPRESENTATIVE AUTHORS AND TITLES

Kurt Vonnegut

Slaughterhouse-five

CONTEXT

Emerges in the twentieth century, in Germany,

then spread throughout Europe, especially in

France.

MAIN CHARACTERISTICS

• Existentialism focuses its attention on the existence and

issues of man, of his being, and on giving solutions to the

problems of man.

• Not only reason discovers reality: also basic feelings as

anguish and frustration discover it.

• Pessimism: Existentialists are characterized by a marked

pessimism in their ideas.

• The fact of creating its own essence: existentialism raises

that only man exists and that a regret of having a marked

pessimism is a positivism in being able to create one's

essence.

Albert camus

El extranjero

Jean Paul Sartre

La Náusea

REPRESENTATIVE AUTHORS AND TITLES

James Joyce

Ulysses

CONTEXT

in English Literature occupied the

years from shortly after the

beginning of the twentieth century

through roughly 1965.

MAIN CHARACTERISTICS

• Realistic (mostly)

• Postmodern – disconnected, combines genres/time

periods

• Thoughtful – not always a happy ending

• Written in vernacular

• Lots of figurative language

• Symbols are important

Elizabeth Bishop

El arte de perder

Joseph Conrad

Lord Jim

REPRESENTATIVE AUTHORS AND TITLES

Hilda Doolittle

Sea Rose

Esmeralda: I like this kind of works because I can see the differences in the way

people write, I mean, at some point they get a way to write and change with the

pass of the time

Luis Carlón: I think that some persons (Including me) thing that theatre are kind of

boring or maybe not just good enough to give him a chance but with this research

my opinion might change a little bit, well I think the principal reason of why theatre

is so underestimated is because we are so adapt to the movie and how are they

presented with all the color and CGI that can have that makes our imagination not

work enough because they are giving everything, but the theatre is just talent and

imagination and performance from those that are in the stage en backstage.

Juan Nava: This type of work I like a lot, since they help me to know an important

part of the literature, which in the personal is also one of the most beautiful and

interesting.

OPINION:

Daniela: It was really interesting to do this work because I learn more about things

that I really didn't know, honestly the best for me was Classical Greece because I

think it was really interesting the way they competed and I like it because I think

its nice that the contest was in the spring festival just to honor a god. I also think

that there are others that are interesting like Classical Greece.

Ares: Doing this activity helped me to realize how the theater was changed through

history, since many things were modified as the characteristics of the scenarios,

the theme of the works presented, the purpose of the performance, the actors,

the characterizations, among many other aspects that were modified.

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