Drama Genre

9 Key excerpts on "Drama Genre"

• 

  eBook - PDF

  An Approach to the Semiotics of Theatre

  • Ji?í Veltruský, Jiří Veltruský(Authors)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • Masarykova univerzita

    (Publisher)

  To describe all these plays as more or less narrative seriously impoverishes the concept of the dramatic genre; it also dis- torts that of the narrative genre, which comes to appear as a residual category, a pot-pourri of literary texts that do not belong anywhere else. Without drama, the history of literature would be unthinkable, and so would the history of drama without literature; drama constantly draws on lyric and narrative sources and in its turn influences these neighbouring genres (Muka- řovský 1941b). What distinguishes it from them is that it is essentially dialogic, while lyric and narrative are monologic. So the fundamental dichotomy of language, dialogue :: monologue, produces an asymmetrical division of the literary genres: the dramatic on the one hand, and the lyric together with the narrative on the other (Mukařovský 1940b). The fact that a play is a literary work implies two principles, which the tradi- tional history and theory of literature have systematically ignored. First, drama is made out of just one sort of material and that is language; in this respect it differs from the lyric and narrative genres only in so far as it organizes the language in its own way. Second, the literary structure of a play comprises the whole of the text written by the playwright, that is to say not only the dialogue and any monologues it may contain but also all the author’s notes, also known as stage directions, rubrics or didascalia (Veltruský 1941b; 1977: 9 and 40–43; 1985). At first sight, this second principle might seem rather trivial. But what is actually at issue is whether the whole of what the playwright has written is a literary entity, or whether this whole divides into a literary text intended for the audience and a technical apparatus meant for the actors (or “carpenter’s and costumier’s directions”, as Shaw puts it in his preface to Plays Unpleasant). In point of fact, the author’s notes are an integral part of a play’s literary structure.

  Sign up to read

  Learn more about book
• 

  Available until 31 Dec |Learn more

  The Book of Literary Terms

  The Genres of Fiction, Drama, Nonfiction, Literary Criticism, and Scholarship, Second Edition

  • Lewis Turco(Author)
  • 2020(Publication Date)
  • UNM Press

    (Publisher)

  The Genres of Drama

  There are several subgenres of the literary genre called drama. The first type of drama in the Western world apparently grew out of ceremonial music as it was performed in sixth-century BC Greece, in the region of Athens; thus, the first “plays” were musical theater . The Greek poet Thespis invented a form of music that required a character, which he himself portrayed, and a chorus; these interacted with one another, telling a tragic story by means of dialogue, song and dance. This form of drama was soon so popular that in 534 BC a theatrical competition was held, in honor of Dionysus, the god of drink, fertility and revelry, to decide the best new tragedy written by the playwrights of the period. Such contests soon became annual events throughout the Greek world, including perhaps Hellenic Egypt, for it has been postulated that The Book of Job of the Old Testament was originally a Greek tragedy, and it has been so reconstructed in the twentieth century.

  Over five hundred tragedies were written in ancient Greece, but only thirty-two have survived. Aeschylus added a second character to the cast of the Thespian play in the fifth century BC, and Sophocles added a third. These innovations allowed the playwright to compose works that were infinitely more complex psychologically and more active dramatically. Clearly, the form of tragedy was continually evolving, but in the fourth century BC. Aristotle in his Poetics analyzed the work of Sophocles as typical tragedies, in effect freezing the form, as it were, for the study of scholars and tragedians. Nevertheless, tragedy continued to develop in the works of Hippolytus, Euripides, and others, and other types of plays were added to the programs of the ancient competitions, including burlesques such as the satyr play

  Sign up to read

  Learn more about book
• 

  eBook - ePub

  A Narratology of Drama

  Dramatic Storytelling in Theory, History, and Culture from the Renaissance to the Twenty-First Century

  • Christine Schwanecke(Author)
  • 2022(Publication Date)
  • De Gruyter

    (Publisher)

  Genette 2000 [1979] , 213).

  Secondly, genres are inherently contradictory: On the one hand, a genre follows relatively fixed sets of conventions that constitute its repertoire. These basic generic rules fulfil important communicative functions: They are essential for literary communication to succeed. Authors are aware of generic principles – of a drama or a poem, a murder mystery, a Western, a soap opera, or a tragedy – and adhere to them (or deviate from them), while recipients expect them (or interpret any deviation from or variation on them). On the other hand, genres change and evolve. Tied to the historical and cultural circumstances under which they emerge and subject to changes within the system of genres, they change in response to their times and to other genres. The definitions and realisations of genres may also vary from cultural context to cultural context. As Heta Pyrhönen (2007 , 119) puts it, “As historical phenomena, genres are subject to changes and modifications, even extinction.” The medieval liturgical play, for instance, not only radically differs in its content and possible functions from a nineteenth-century drawing-room comedy or a twentieth-century farce; it is nowadays not even written or produced at all.14

  Thirdly, genres are unbelievably complex. Marion Gymnich and Birgit Neumann (cf. 2007 , 35) have come to terms with this complexity by differentiating four interrelated levels that make up the ‘compound term’ genre. There is (a) the level of the individual text or texts with its or their intra-textual characteristics, e.g., specific form and content (Gymnich and Neumann 2007 , 36–38). There is (b) the cultural and historical level (in its synchronic and diachronic dimension) to which the respective text is tied – for instance, produced, stored, canonised, and/or received in (Gymnich and Neumann 2007 , 38–45). There is (c) the cognitive level, referring to individuals’ actualisations of a text, in which they construct generic and textual meaning (Gymnich and Neumann 2007 , 45–46). And there is (d) the level of possible and potential functions (Gymnich and Neumann 2007 , 47–48), i.e., effects and syntheses that respond to special historical requirements and expectations of historical producers and recipients. Those potential functions may concern the (system of) genres and texts themselves, or they may be extra-textual and contextual. While all levels are in dialogue with each other, level (d) can be regarded as a super-ordinate level, on which all other levels are synthesised (cf. Gymnich and Neumann 2007

  Sign up to read

  Learn more about book
• 

  eBook - ePub

  Media Entertainment

  The Psychology of Its Appeal

  • Dolf Zillmann, Peter Vorderer(Authors)
  • 2000(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  It is surprising to learn how much of their time individuals deliberately devote to consuming these dramas. When viewers are asked about their reasons for entertaining themselves with dramatic media content, they often refer to the fact that these dramas are suspenseful (i.e., that they can feel suspense when they read or witness a drama). It seems that suspense bears the same relevance to the understanding of what happens with the audience as conflict does to the definition of drama. Suspense might even be the viewer’s or reader’s appropriate response to the conflicts that are witnessed in the drama. Based on these considerations, this chapter discusses the following three questions:

  1. Why does drama evoke suspense?
  2. Why is suspense experienced as entertaining?
  3. Why is suspense so often sought through drama?

  To begin with the impact of drama (as a category of the text) on suspense (as a category of the user), we first refer to descriptions of what comprises drama. Next, we examine the audience’s response to drama (i.e., suspense and entertainment). Finally, we address the issue of the underlying motivation of the viewer.

  Drama as Genre

  Drama includes literary texts and nonliterary performances, such as film. It covers subtypes such as tragedy, comedy, and mystery. It differs primarily from other forms of entertainment by the great importance it attaches to the overarching plot. Genres such as situation comedy, erotica, and horror and mayhem derive their appeal from discrete scenes. Knowing the background of the story usually is not a precondition for the amusing or exciting effect of the episodes. In contrast, the appeal of drama evolves with the plot. Of course, the term plot

  Sign up to read

  Learn more about book
• 

  No longer available |Learn more

  An Introduction to Literary Studies

  • Mario Klarer(Author)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Film's idiosyncratic modes of presentation — such as camera angle, editing, montage, slow and fast motion — often parallel features of literary texts or can be explained within a textual framework. Although film has its own specific characteristics and terminology, it is possible to analyze film by drawing on methods of literary criticism, as film criticism closely relates to the traditional approaches of textual studies. The most important of these methodologies coincide with the ones that we will discuss in the next chapter on literary theory. There are, for example, approaches similar to text-oriented literary criticism that deal with the material aspects of film, such as film stock, montage, editing, and sound. Methodologies that are informed by reception aesthetics focus on the effect on the spectator, and approaches, such as psychoanalytical theory or feminist film theory, regard film within a larger contextual framework. The major developments of literary theory have therefore also been borrowed or adapted by film studies.

  In spite of their differing forms and media, drama and film are often categorized under the heading performing arts because they use actors as their major means of expression. The visualization of the action is not left merely to the imagination of the reader, but rather comes to life in the performance, independent of the audience. In both genres, a performance (in the sense of a visual representation by people) stands at the center of attention. It is misleading, however, to deal with film exclusively in the context of drama, since categorizing it under the performing arts does not do justice to the entire genre, which also includes non-narrative subgenres without performing actors.

  The study of film has existed for quite some time now as an independent discipline, especially in the Anglo-American world. Since its invention more than 100 years ago, film has also produced diverse cinematic genres and forms that no longer permit the classification of film as a mere by-product of drama. Because of its visual power — the visual element plays only a minor role in fiction — film is hastily classified as a dramatic genre. If we deal with film from a formalist-structuralist point of view, however, its affinity to the novel often overshadows its links to drama. Typical narratological elements of the novel — varied narrative techniques, experimental structuring of the plot, foreshadowing and flashback, the change of setting and time structure — are commonly used in film. The stage offers only limited space for the realization of many of these techniques.

  The most obvious difference between film and drama is the fact that a film is recorded and preserved rather than individually staged in the unique and unrepeatable manner of a theater performance. Films, and particularly DVDs and blu-ray Discs, are like novels, which in theory can be repeatedly read or viewed. In this sense, a play is an archaic work of art, placing the ideal of uniqueness on a pedestal. Every theatrical performance — involving a particular director, specific actors, and scenery — is a unique event that eludes exact repetition. A film, on the other hand, can be shown in different cities at the same time, and it would be impossible to judge one screening as better or worse than any other one since the film always remains the same in its thousands of identical copies. In sum, we can say that, although performance is at the heart of both drama and movies, it takes on a completely different character in film, due to the characteristics of a mechanically reproducible medium.

  Sign up to read

  Learn more about book
• 

  No longer available |Learn more

  'Those Gay Days of Wickedness and Wit'

  The Restoration Period in Popular Historiographies (18th–21st Centuries)

  • Dorothea Flothow(Author)
  • 2021(Publication Date)
  • Universitätsverlag Winter

    (Publisher)

  Thus, strategies of 'policing' (Woolf 2003: 9) the boundaries of the correct ways of speaking about the past, of establishing hierarchies which also imply reliability (see ch 1.3), are central to definitions of historical drama, historical novels, and other popular forms. 2.2 Defining Historical Drama Most studies of historical drama agree that this genre is particularly difficult to define. Indeed, Teresa Grant and Barbara Ravelhofer (2008a: 1) state: Critical attention will probably never result in a satisfactory agreed answer to the question 'What is a history play?' The most obvious reason seems that, unlike verse drama or tragedies, but like the historical novel, historical drama is not characterised by formal or structural aspects, but only very broadly by its content. 17 Any definition of the genre therefore has to deal with the difficult question what consti-tutes 'history', or more precisely, history in historical drama. A further problem is historical drama's fluidity to other genres. Most famously, this is apparent in Elizabethan history plays: The term 'history' was used promis-cuously in titles of plays during the period: quarto editions of Shakespeare's plays include The True Chronicle History of King Lear , The tragical history of Hamlet, and The Most Excellent History of the Merchant of Venice […]. 18 In later centuries, the ambiguities of this genre continued (see ch 4.2.1). A third problem is that most studies concentrate on a very narrow corpus of plays. Studies of the 17 Düsing (1998: 2; my translation). There have been attempts to define the genre through its structural openness. See Snyder (2001); Griffin (2001). For a detailed discussion of this approach see Kewes (2003: 176-82). 18 Chernaik (2007: 8). On Shakespeare's classification see Howard (1999); Chernaik (2007); Kastan (2001); Dutton / Howard (2003); Kewes (2003).

  Sign up to read

  Learn more about book
• 

  eBook - PDF

  How to Read Texts

  A Student Guide to Critical Approaches and Skills

  • Neil McCaw(Author)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Bloomsbury Academic

    (Publisher)

  As we are looking in this chapter at how a reader might draw specifically on genre and literary/cultural history as contexts, the first stage is to consider how to define our subject matter: Genre a kind; sort; style b A particular style or category of works of art; esp. a type of literary work characterized by a particular form, style, or purpose. Oxford English Dictionary ( OED ) In these senses genre is either a broad categorization or else the grouping of artworks based on shared characteristics. Either way the implication is that there are common codes and conventions shared by different texts, an idea that has been prevalent in critical writing from as far back as Plato’s division of written texts into poetry, drama and prose. Aristotle subsequently defined tragedy, epic, comedy and parody. In fact, writers from all eras have been interested in looking at categories of artistic form(s): Reading genre and literary/cultural history 87 It is impossible that anyone who inhabits the same age with such writers as those who stand in the foremost ranks of our own, can conscientious-ly assure himself that his language and tone of thought may not have been modified by the study of the productions of those extraordinary intellects. It is true, that, not the spirit of their genius, but the forms in which it has manifested itself [my italics], are due less to the peculiarities of their own minds than to the peculiarity of the moral and intellectual condition of the minds among which they have been produced. 1 For Shelley, by considering the formal/genre context a reader gains a clearer under-standing of the way in which writers work and the process through which their writing takes shape. Just as in the twentieth century critics identified the notion of genre as one of the key ‘structures’ of literary history.

  Sign up to read

  Learn more about book
• 

  No longer available |Learn more

  (En-)Gendering a Popular Theatrical Genre

  The Roles of Women in Nineteenth-Century British Melodrama

  • Merle Tönnies(Author)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • Universitätsverlag Winter

    (Publisher)

  7 Long before the antagonists (or modernisers, depending on the critic’s point of view) of tragedy openly began to call their works ‘melodrama’, the theatrically ‘competent’ spectators (and playwrights) will thus have been aware of plays of this kind as a separate genre which had special affinities with the ‘minor’ theatres but appeared at the patent houses as well (see also Cox 2007, 164). The present work will understand ‘melodrama’ in this sense, taking it to comprise all dramatic works that positioned themselves in the theatrical genre system of pre-1860 Britain as ‘serious’ drama (i.e. as distinct from ‘comedy’ and other forms of comic plays), but deliberately set themselves apart from the ‘legitimate’ genre of tragedy through their genre label and/or chosen theatrical context. Starting from this basis, one can catalogue the genre’s key characteristics, which were partly taken over from the French origins and partly created anew and which – due to the immense popularity of the new form and the intense interaction between audiences, theatre managers and playwrights – were streamlined exceedingly quickly into an established repertoire of techniques. The next part of the analysis will chart these traits in detail. Subsequent chapters can then treat plays with diverse genre designations as ‘melodramas’, as long as their adherence to that ‘generic repertoire’ (see Fowler 1982, 55-56) will have 6 Cf. Jane Moody (2000, 4): “the opposition between legitimate and illegitimate theatre constitutes the fundamental category of distinction in this period’s drama. This basic binary opposition is the reason why clear-cut ‘genre’ distinctions are much more useful in the present work than the more comprehensive concept of ‘discourse’, which “resolutely transgresses received genre categories” and has superseded questions of genre especially in the realm of cultural studies (Williams 1999, 519-520).

  Sign up to read

  Learn more about book
• 

  eBook - ePub

  Postdramatic Theatre

  • Hans-Thies Lehmann, Karen Juers-Munby(Authors)
  • 2006(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Therefore, a consideration of what is being left behind when drama is being left behind is best started here. Drama and tragedy were considered the highest form or one of the highest forms of the appearance of Spirit. Drama took on a distinguished role in the canon of the arts because of the dialectical essence of the genre (dialogue, conflict, solution; a high degree of abstraction essential for the dramatic form; exposition of the subject in its state of conflict). As the art form of process, it is, even to date, identified with the dialectical movement of alienation and sublation. Thus, Szondi attributes dialectic to the genre of drama and to tragedy. 17 Marxist theoreticians have sometimes claimed drama to be the embodiment of the dialectic of history. Historians have time and again taken recourse to the metaphors of drama, tragedy and comedy to describe the sense and inner unity of historical processes. This tendency has been furthered by the objective element of theatricality in history itself. Thus, above all the French Revolution with its grand entrances, speeches, gestures and exits has time and again been conceived of as a drama with conflict, solution, heroic roles and spectators. To view history as drama, however, almost inevitably introduces teleology, pointing towards a finally meaningful perspective – reconciliation in idealist aesthetics, historical progress in Marxist historiography. Drama promises dialectic. 18 Some scholars were so carried away by this aesthetic meaningfulness of history that they went so far as to say that history itself had an objective dramatic beauty. 19 Conversely, authors like Samuel Beckett and Heiner Müller avoided the dramatic form not least of all because of its implied teleology of history. The tight entanglement of drama and dialectic and, more generally, of drama and abstraction has often been noted. Abstraction is inherent to drama

  Sign up to read

  Learn more about book