Undergraduate Course: Bertolt Brecht (ELCG10022)

Course Outline
School	School of Literatures, Languages and Cultures	College	College of Humanities and Social Science
Credit level (Normal year taken)	SCQF Level 10 (Year 1 Undergraduate)	Availability	Not available to visiting students
SCQF Credits	20	ECTS Credits	10
Summary	Brecht was one of the twentieth century's greatest writers and theatre directors. He was equally at home with drama, theatre practice and poetry, and he contributed energetically to contemporary political and aesthetic debates. This course focuses on plays that Brecht wrote in the 1920s and 1930s, but we will also look at selected poems, including their musical settings, and essays on theatre and politics. There will be optional film screenings of some of Brecht's own productions, which show how epic theatre worked in practice. When analysing the plays, we will consider how Brecht responded to different political and cultural contexts during the Weimar Republic and his years in exile, and how he came to channel his rebellion against conventional bourgeois theatre into the development of a new theatrical aesthetic. The plays themselves deal, often in contrasting ways, with issues such as identity, political commitment, motherhood, religion and war. We shall consider these themes alongside current critical debates on epic theatre and the status of Brecht's oeuvre since the collapse of state Socialism in Eastern Europe.
Course description	Not entered

Entry Requirements (not applicable to Visiting Students)
Pre-requisites		Co-requisites
Prohibited Combinations		Other requirements	Honours entry

Course Delivery Information

Academic year 2017/18, Not available to visiting students (SS1)		Quota: 12
Course Start	Semester 1
Timetable	Timetable
Learning and Teaching activities (Further Info)	Total Hours: 200 ( Summative Assessment Hours 1.5, Programme Level Learning and Teaching Hours 4, Directed Learning and Independent Learning Hours 194 )
Assessment (Further Info)	Written Exam 50 %, Coursework 50 %, Practical Exam 0 %
Additional Information (Assessment)	1 Coursework essay 2- 2,500 words (50%) 1 Examination 1 hr 30 minutes (50%)
Feedback	Not entered
Exam Information
Exam Diet	Paper Name		Hours & Minutes
Main Exam Diet S1 (December)	Bertolt Brecht (ELCG10022)		1:30

Learning Outcomes
On completion of this course, the student will be able to: Demonstrate a good understanding of the nature and significance of Brecht's theatrical experimentation and the development of epic theatre; Demonstrate a good understanding of the continuities and changes in Brecht's work, and of how they relate to the contexts in which he was working; Show a good awareness of the significance of Brecht's plays as texts written for stage performance, i.e. show an understanding of their theatricality; Research and produce clear, complex essays, which develop arguments both critically and systematically with the use of relevant emphases, subsidiary points, and examples from both primary and secondary sources; Demonstrate finely honed communication, presentation and interaction skills across a range of media and circumstances, both formal and informal, for lay and specialised audiences.