Course Description
This course has two objectives. (1) It aims to put Shakespeare back into his own time, including: What was a play? What was Shakespeare’s first audience? What was the relationship of theater to power? (2) It also attempts to consider Shakespeare as a cultural process, including: Shakespeare in relation to other cultural materials, Shakespeare mediated by critical theories. By looking at Shakespeare’s originating contexts as well as his afterlife we might gain an insight into the impact of theory on Shakespeare studies in our age.
For the second purpose, we will dabble in some of the major contemporary critical theories by reading essays of application practices. The student will be required to turn in a one-to-two page critical summary (critique) on an essay roughly every two weeks. By the end of the term, each student is expected to have developed a specialty of his/her choice. The term paper will be a presentation of any of Shakespeare’s plays through the lens of a particular theory.
The seminar will cover topics and plays as follows:
1. Shakespeare’s Great Four. RJ, 1 & 2 H4, H5, MND
2. Traditional approaches: Wilfred L. Guerin, et al. A Handbook of Critical Approaches to Literature
3. New Historicism: Stephen Greenblatt’s Renaissance Self-Fashioning; Leonard Tennenhouse’s Power on Display
4. Psychocriticism: Freud, Lacan, Melanie Klein, the British School, object relations, Karen Horny (strategies of defense)
5. Feminism
6. Post-colonialism
7.