COD 2026 - D1234

Webinar - Affectively Excessive? A Streetcar Named Desire by Tennessee Williams. Cambridge IGCSE Literature in English for Exams in 2026

Language and Literature secondary school teachers

2 sessions, start: 08-May

Please enrol before Tuesday, May 5th 2026

Course detail

Year: 2026
Level: Distance
Language: English
Status: In progress
Lugar: Distance
Facilitator/s: Martha Patricia De Cunto
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Sessions

Sessions Dates Start Finish
1 08 May 2026 05:30 pm 07:00 pm
2 15 May 2026 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. She is pursuing a Master's Degree in Cultural Studies at UNR (Universidad Nacional de Rosario). 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. She has been an International Baccalaureate examiner since 2013.
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, their effects on the individuals and social relationships. The webinar will discuss the main characters’ emotions, their relationship to space and time and their external and inner conflicts. It will deal with different levels of analysis: linguistic, thematic, psychological, sociocultural and mythic. It will focus on clusters of images and theatrical devices.
1) Main conflicts and themes
2) Cultural elements and contextual features
3) Brutal, direct language vs. polite language
4) Narratives of self and others
5) Key rhetorical figures and symbolic elements
6) Genre: tragicomedy, theatre of excess and cruelty. The grotesque
7) Emotionalization 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
The facilitator will present the contents and use excerpts from the play for analysis. Participants will work on questions for Paper 2 and Paper 3 exam practice.
Ahmed, S. (2004). The Cultural Politics of Emotion. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Clough, P. (ed.) (2007).The Affective Turn. Theorizing the Social. Durham and London: Duke University Press.
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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