This course offers students the opportunity to engage with the relatively abundant outputs of Scottish Gaelic playwrights and translators of plays into Gaelic from other languages as well as the growing secondary literature pertaining to the corpus. The course allows students to consider the theory and practice of a minority language on stage and, in particular, it provides a window onto Scottish Gaelic identity politics and revitalization efforts. The course surveys the major movements and associated time periods of Gaelic plays as follows: 1) Background of Gaelic Performance Culture and Precursors of the Gaelic Play; 2) First Gaelic on Stage; 3) Translation; 4) The Celtic Revival and Gaelic Plays; 5) Identify and Gaelic Plays 1920-1950;6) The Avant-Garde in Gaelic 1960s and 1970s; 7) A contemporary cosmopolitan Gaelic theatre?

10x1hr lectures, 10x1 hr seminars over 10 weeks, as scheduled in MyCampus. This is one of the honours options for Celtic & Gaelic and may not run every year. The options that are running this session are available in MyCampus.

None

None

Essay (2000 words) - 40%

4 x source critiques (500 words each) - 40%

Seminar Presentation with PowerPoint (10 minutes) - 20%

Reassessments are normally available for all courses, except those which contribute to the Honours classification. For non-Honours courses, students are offered reassessment in all or any of the components of assessment if the satisfactory (threshold) grade for the overall course is not achieved at the first attempt. This is normally grade D3 for undergraduate students and grade C3 for postgraduate students. Exceptionally it may not be possible to offer reassessment of some coursework items, in which case the mark achieved at the first attempt will be counted towards the final course grade. Any such exceptions for this course are described below. 

This course aims to:

■ Provide students with an overview of the extent, historical context and most important genres of the corpus of Scottish Gaelic drams from 1790 to the present day.

■ Introduce students to the ways in which a range of key analytical and theoretical tools used in theatre studies can be applied to the corpus and context of Scottish Gaelic Drama.

■ Encourage the development of critical thinking and some independent personal response in relation to the plays studied as well as fostering a range of other graduate attributes such as effective communication.

By the end of this course students will be able to:

■ Outline the development and historical contexts of Scottish Gaelic playwriting since the eighteenth century until the present day.

■ Give a detailed account of a large number of primary Gaelic and bilingual Gaelic/English play texts

■ Discuss critically the ways in which Gaelic playwrights used the medium to engage with issues such as cultural change, politics and identify

Students must submit at least 75% by weight of the components (including examinations) of the course's summative assessment.