This term I gave a lecture about how sexual assault is portrayed in drama. Over the hour, my students and I considered extracts from Sarah Kane’s 1995 play Blasted and William Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus, and in particular how traumatic experiences can be treated in art and in criticism in more or less ridiculous, comic, or frivolous ways.
In the lecture timetable sent to students before term starts, I signalled that the way this discussion was conducted might be particularly difficult for those who had personally encountered abuse or assault. Very few lectures offered to students by my faculty are accompanied by such trigger warnings, but I attached mine in the knowledge that I’d be discussing these issues extensively, and that I’d be considering how the playwrights in question demean their victims by theatrical means.
Continue reading...from The Guardian http://ift.tt/2ihD3rg
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