COD 2025 - D1081

Webinar - A Streetcar Named Desire by Tennessee Williams for Cambridge 2025 IGCSE Literature in English (Paper 3) (2025 – 2026)

Language and Literature secondary school teachers

2 sessions, start: 07-Mar

Course detail

Year: 2025
Level: Distance
Language: English
Status: Ended
Lugar: Distance
Facilitator/s: Martha Patricia De Cunto
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Sessions

Sessions Dates Start Finish
1 07 March 2025 05:30 pm 07:00 pm
2 14 March 2025 05:30 pm 07:00 pm

Facilitator/s

Martha Patricia De Cunto

She holds a Master of Arts in Literary Linguistics from the University of Nottingham, UK and is currently doing a PhD in Literature at the University of Buenos Aires. She is also pursuing a Master's Degree in Cultural Studies at UNR. She has been a lecturer in American Literature, Children's Literature, YAL Literature and Introduction to Literary Studies at I.E.S. Lenguas Vivas "Juan Ramón Fernández". She has also taught Creative Writing at ISP “Joaquín V. González”. She has been a teacher of Language and Literature in several schools in Buenos Aires for more than 30 years.
Language and Literature secondary school teachers
A Streetcar Named Desire by Tennessee Williams, a realistic and expressionistic Post War American play, focuses in on the dramatic tension between Blanche DuBois, a faded belle of the Old South who has become a destitute and is trying to survive in an increasingly pragmatic urbanized world, and Stanley Kowalski, a working-class laborer of Polish descent married to Blanche’s sister. The play challenges the students to discover the social, economic and cultural rifts between the characters and assess their behaviors and linguistic exchanges. The play lends itself well to an analysis of the multiplicity of interpretations about society’s values and their effects on the individuals and their social relationships. The webinar will discuss the main characters’ fears, their external and inner conflicts. It will deal with different levels of analysis: linguistic, thematic, psychological, sociocultural and mythic. It will focus on the meaning of clusters of images and theatrical devices and it will propose activities for the classroom.
1) Main conflicts and themes.
2) Cultural elements and contextual features.
3) Brutal, direct language vs. polite language
4) Analysis of the narratives of self.
5) Key rhetorical figures and symbolic elements.
6) Genre: tragicomedy, theatre of excess and cruelty. The grotesque.
7) The literal and symbolic use of space.
8) Analysis of characters’ emotions and their effects on reality assessment.
9) The use of stage directions and the role of the narrator in those directions.
10) Activities for the classroom.
The facilitator will present the topics and give examples from the play. Participants will be required to work on questions for exam practice. There will also be debate in each session.
Griffin, A. (1995). Understanding Tennessee Williams. South Carolina: University of South Carolina Press.
Harris, J. (1993). “Perceptual Conflict and the Perversion of Creativity in A Streetcar Named Desire.” Confronting Tennessee Williams’s A Streetcar: Essays in Critical Pluralism, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1993, pp. 184-203.
Hornby, R. (2004). “Southern Decadence” The Hudson Review, Inc., pp. 111-117 https://www.jstor.org/stable/4151389
Hulley, K. (1988). “The Fate of the Symbolic in A Streetcar Named Desire.” Modern Critical Interpretations: Tennessee Williams’s A Streetcar Named Desire, Edited by Harold Bloom. Chelsea House Publishers, NY, 1988, pp. 111-22.
Isaac, D. (2010). “No Past to Think In: Who Wins in A Streetcar Named Desire?” Critical insights: A Streetcar Named Desire, Boston: Salem Press, 2010, pp 154-90.
Jones, B.F. (1966). “The Struggle for Identity” The British Journal of Sociology Vol. 17 No. 2 Published by Wiley (pp.107-121).
Kristeva, J.(1982) Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. NY:Columbia UP
Saddik, J.A. (2007). Contemporary American Drama. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press
-------------- (2015). Tennessee Williams and The Theatre of Excess: The Strange, The Crazed, The Queer. Cambridge University Press.
Spoto, D.( 1985) The Kindness of Strangers: The Life of Tennessee Williams. Boston: Little Brown
Wright, E. (1984). Psychoanalytic Criticism. Theory in Practice. Methuen.
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