Athenian and Shakespearean tragedies in Oceaniai: Teaching dramatic literatures in Fiji

This paper presents a theorised classroom-based narrative discussing the author’s interdisciplinary approach to the teaching of English dramatic literatures—in particular, Sophocles’ Oedipus the King and Shakespeare’s Macbeth—to i-Taukei, Indo-Fijian and Pacific Islander tertiary students at a South Pacific university. The discussion advocates oral interpretation as a successful approach in teaching dramatic literatures in English and discusses the utility of translations of Greek and Shakespearian plays in particular in necessarily involving these students in a proactive process of articulating cognitive and performative understandings of literature, identity and place in the geographical context nowadays expressed as “Oceania”.