Identification of World Plays After 1925
AP English Literature and Composition · Learn by Concept
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AP English Literature and Composition › Identification of World Plays After 1925
What is the name of the Ghanaian writer who wrote the play The Dilemma of a Ghost?
Ama Ata Aidoo
Wole Solinka
Stanley French
Aimé Césaire
Derek Walcott
Explanation
This is Ama Ata Aidoo, a poet, playwright, and novelist. She often incorporates elements of African legend, cultural identity, gender studies, and feminism into her work.
This Caribbean writer’s best known play is A Tempest, based on Shakespeare’s The Tempest and written with a postcolonial slant. Who is he?
Aimé Césaire
Fernando Arrabal
Ama Ata Aidoo
Stanley French
Mario Vargas Llosa
Explanation
This is Aimé Césaire, a French-educated native of Martinique and an incipient member of the négritude ideology. His work is often preoccupied with power, colonial rule, and racial identity.
This French playwright and champion of the Theatre of the Absurd movement was known for dramas including The Maids, The Balcony, and The Blacks.
Jean Genet
Aimé Césaire
Eugène Ionesco
Samuel Beckett
Harald Pinter
Explanation
This is Jean Genet, whose work often features social misfits or people on the outskirts of a community. His work, which is heavily steeped in absurdism, investigates morality as well as the constructs of racial and social identities.
This Nigerian poet and dramatist, the first African Nobel Prize in Literature laureate, is known for plays such as The Lion and the Jewel, Kongi’s Harvest, and Death and the King’s Horsemen.
Wole Solinka
Ama Ata Aidoo
Aimé Césaire
Stanley French
Derek Walcott
Explanation
The playwright in question is Wole Solinka. His work often concerns colonialism and contemporary African politics, government, and corruption. His plays have been said to be influenced by traditional Yoruba drama and theatre of the absurd.
The German playwright and poet Bertolt Brecht wrote which of the following important anti-war plays?
Mother Courage and Her Children
Waiting for Godot
The Caretaker
The Rhinoceros
The Bird
Explanation
Brecht’s works, among which are Mother Courage and Her Children and The Caucasian Chalk Circle, often encouraged audience participation and deep critical thinking. He is often considered a founder of Epic Theatre, although he chose to qualify or reject that classification. Mother Courage and Her Children is one of many of his plays written in response to the rise of Nazism.
What Peruvian writer and Nobel laureate wrote the plays La Chunga; Pretty Eyes, Ugly Pictures; and The Madman of the Balconies?
Mario Vargas Llosa
Sebastián Salazar Bondy
Alejandro Jodorowsky
Julio Cortázar
Fernando Arrabal
Explanation
This is Mario Vargas Llosa, one of the most influential Latin American writers of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. His work (which includes novels and essays as well as drama) is often political and anti-nationalistic and is deeply invested in portraying power struggles between rulers and the poor or disenfranchised.
One of Peru’s most important writers, this poet and playwright used works such as There Is No Happy Island and A Certain Tic Tac to highlight urban crime, poverty, lingering colonial influences, and conditions on the streets of Lima. Who is he?
Sebastián Salazar Bondy
Mario Vargas Llosa
Julio Cortázar
Aimé Césaire
Fernando Arrabal
Explanation
This is Sebastián Salazar Bondy, whose other notable works include Something That Wants to Die, There’s No Gasoline in Heaven, and Flora Tristán.
Which avant-garde Romanian writer was a significant figure in the Theatre of the Absurd?
Eugène Ionesco
Jean Genet
Aimé Césaire
Constantin Brâncuși
Alejandro Jodorowsky
Explanation
This is Eugène Ionesco, whose works include The Rhinoceros, The Bald Soprano, and Exit the King. Ionesco plays often emphasize the pointlessness of human existence and utilize disorienting elements such as non-sequiturs, dreamlike storytelling, and jarring verbal feats.
This Nobel Prize-winning Caribbean poet, author of Omeros and Sea Grapes, also wrote such plays as Dream on Monkey Mountain and The Capeman. Who is it?
Derek Walcott
Aimé Césaire
Stanley French
Ama Ata Aidoo
Wole Solinka
Explanation
This is the St. Lucian poet Derek Walcott, winner of the 1992 Nobel Prize in Literature. Walcott often incorporates themes of post-colonialism and national identity as well as mythical and European elements into his writing.