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Dramatic Encounters: A Streetcar Named Desire
infoWhy this? Williams’ play offers sustained opportunities to investigate how dramatic language and performance construct conflict, power, identity, and relationships. Analysing dialogue, turn-taking, terms of address, implicature, politeness, non-fluency, stage directions, and non-verbal behaviour reveals how meaning emerges through interaction. Its domestic conflicts also illuminate wider social tensions involving gender, class, sexuality, violence, and changing cultural values.
scheduleWhy now? As the final taught unit, the play draws together linguistic and literary methods developed across the course while extending them to dramatic discourse. Its interpersonal and social conflicts build on The Great Gatsby, allowing us to distinguish narrated encounters from interactions presented for performance. This final shift in genre supports synthesis of how prose, poetry, non-literary texts, and drama construct voices, relationships, and perspectives.