Introduction

Ibsen is said to be the greatest playwright after Shakespeare – that is as good a reason as any for studying his famous play A Doll’s House. Our knowledge of this play will be established by what you – the students – bring to class. The class will be split into four groups with each group presenting a seminar on a specific topic related to the play. Your seminar must be research-based. What this means is that you are not to give your opinion on what certain lines from the play mean. You are instead to research the play and find out what others have said about it. Give the class a summary of some of the popular academic theories about the play. You can of course tell us whether or not you agree with them, but please limit these evaluations to marginal notes in your seminar presentation.

Below are websites that have a great deal of information about each topic upon which the seminar presentations will be based. It is your job to sift though the resources provided to you and present what you feel is relevant to your presentation. Your presentation may have slide shows, movies, and other audio/visual material to present to the class as long as it some how ties into the presentation.

First – a free online version of the play:

http://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/etext01/dlshs11.txt

Take a look at the sidebar - you'll find links for each topic of the seminar presentations. Have a quick read through some of the information that you'll be required to know as part of your seminar presentations before you pick a topic. I want you to be working on something that you're interested in! The information provided in the links under each section is important because it's thorough, and most importantly, well researched. It's important for you to realize that there are better sources for information out there than Wikipedia!

Finally, don't forget to check out the rubric for the seminar presentations. You'll want to know exactly what you are being evaluated on before you actually do the presentation.

If you find other links that are relevant to your topic, post a comment in the post page of the topic that you have been assigned. I'll take a look at it and let you know whether it's useful or not. Questions or comments? Leave either in the comments section of this post. Have fun!