Introduction to Drama and Theatre

Drama

• Drama differs from other literary genres due to its performance-oriented nature.
• Dramatic text is a script designed for performance rather than direct reading.
• Theatre performance combines acoustic and optical dimensions, creating a unique artistic experience distinct from the written text.
• Different stage forms evoke different emotional and imaginative effects.
• Communication in dramatic text often involves multiple speakers and addressees who switch between roles.
• Dialogue is the primary form of information transmission.
• Dramatic texts lack the mediation prevalent in narrative texts.
• Dramatic texts incorporate various elements beyond dialogue, such as titles, dedications, and prefaces.
• Many modern dramas incorporate narrative elements beyond the dialogue.
• Theatre combines verbal and non-verbal communication.
• Theatre's semiotics are determined by the use of verbal/non-verbal and acoustic/optical/visual signs, as well as durative and nondurative codes.
• Theatre codes are categorized based on their connection to actors, stage, or other aspects.
• Exposition introduces the setting and characters to the audience.
• Expositions can be presented initially (isolated passage) or integrated throughout the text.
• Dialogue creates conflict, reveals character motivations, and drives the plot.
• Monologues present characters' thoughts from a subjective perspective.
• Soliloquies, like monologues, are internal speeches revealed to the audience.
• Asides are addressed to the audience or other characters; used for specific purposes such as revealing thoughts and expectations.
• Dramatic irony presents a difference in knowledge between characters and the audience.
• Character actions are fundamental to the plot, significantly impacting the overall narrative.
• Characters can be categorized as realistic or functional, based on their role in the story.
• Dramatis personae is a list of characters, often presented at the beginning of a play.
• Character analysis considers their knowledge, behaviors, and ideological persuasions.
• Characters exhibit either closed or open perspectives towards the world.
• Character types include personification, representing specific attributes or social categories.
• Characterization can be through physical appearance, figural qualities, and their actions before their first appearance.
• Plays often adhere to the unities of time and place.
• Stage, fictional space, and performance time can be related to real-world concepts of time and space.
• Various stage configurations like "Guckkastenbühne" shape how the action on stage is experienced.

Narrative Texts

• Narrative texts focus on characterization, plot, narrative transmission, modes of presentation, representation of time, and space.
• Story is about content, while discourse is how the content is conveyed.
• Plot and story are events arranged in specific order.
• Setting and situation provide context for the events involving characters.
• The communication model in narrative texts involves a real author, a fictive narrator, a fictive reader, and a real reader.
• Character perspective affects how characters act and perceive the world.
• Narrator can be either a participant or observer and be either first-person or third-person.
• Internal/external perspectives reveal the narrator's involvement with the narrated story.
• First-person narratives involve the narrator as a character.
• Authorial narratives present from a detached perspective.
• Figural narratives present from a character's perspective.
• Embedded and frame narratives can appear within one another.
• Homodiegetic = involves intradiegetic narrator, internal perspective.
• Heterodiegetic = doesn't involve intradiegetic character, external perspective.
• Overt vs. covert narrators are explicit or implicit.
• Reliable vs. unreliable narrators are truthful or deceitful.
• Focalizers are the entity through whose perspective the world is told.
• Focalization can be external or internal.
• Interior monologues convey a character's thoughts and feelings.
• Time structure in narratives: chronological (linear order) and anachronistic (flashbacks).
• Discourse time and story time might match or differ.
• Narrative modes include report, scenic report, singulative, repeating, and iterative narration.
• Space in narratives can be mood-invested, an area of action or observed.

Poetry

• Poetry is characterized by subjective perspective (lyric persona), lack of plot, and deviations from everyday language.
• Formal elements like rhyme schema and regular metre contribute to the aesthetic quality.
• Poetry has a focus on artistry, brevity, and variety in its spatial and temporal relations.
• Different relations exist between linguistic elements (paradigmatic and syntagmatic).
• Poems draw upon various linguistic levels, including sound, metre, rhythm, and semantic content.
• Poetic devices like metre and rhythm help organize the poem and create musicality.
• Speech situations in poetry encompass the author (speaker), addresse (lyric person/thou), and the reader.
• Lyric persona and "lyric thou" are fundamental to poetic expression.
• Poetry can be either explicitly or implicitly subjective.
• Poetic structure includes metre (number of stressed/unstressed syllables per line), rhythm, and stanzaic form.
• Phonological structures in poetry include rhyme scheme (end/internal rhymes), repetition of sounds (alliteration, assonance, onomatopoeia), and their functions (enhancing meaning).
• Poetic syntax, such as enjambement and caesura, impact interpretation.
• Rhetorical figures like repetition, parallelism, and chiasmus add layers of meaning.
• Figurative language, such as metaphor and metonymy, enriches meaning.
• Analyzing imagery and semantic structures involves identifying source and target domains, denotations, and connotations.
• Poetic structures impact the overall meaning and interpretation of the piece.