The seminar will focus on the communicative potential of drama as a text written for stage performance. We will discuss Dramatic Rhetoric as a technique for the transferring, the ratification or the refutation of information, ideas and feelings, and hence as a tool for impacting, by dramatic language, the viewer's mind and emotions.

Using this point of view we shall read plays as encrypted text. We will focus on the internal constituents of the dramatic text and the interrelationships among them, in order to identify sequences of images delivered through different channels of transmission/reception, and determine if and how they are organized as rhetorical structures that serve a structural function in the play. Emphasis will be placed on the dynamic relation between content and form, structure and meaning.