English

This course provides an intensive examination of the plays of William Shakespeare, with a particular emphasis on Shakespeare’s legacy and the adaptability of his works across historical and cultural contexts—and across genres and media. As we read through the Shakespeare canon, we will study the social, religious, and political contexts of the early modern period during which Shakespeare’s works emerged, and we will consider the varying ways in which Shakespeare (as we know him) was at once a product and a producer of that culture. We will also examine closely the material conditions that shaped and defined the experiences of both seeing a Shakespeare play on stage and reading a Shakespeare play in print during the late 16th and early 17th centuries.

A central part of our work as a class will also be to consider Shakespeare’s afterlives— the complex and ever-shifting ways in which Shakespeare’s literary output and cultural significance have been defined, contested, written (and re-written), and appropriated (and re-appropriated) over the past 400+ years. As an extension of this critical focus, we will also interrogate the powerful (and at times problematic) ways in which Shakespeare’s status as an icon—if not the icon—of literary value has long affected readers’ and audiences’ encounters with his work. Ben Jonson wrote, in 1623 that Shakespeare “was not for an age but for all time,” and Harold Bloom, in 1998, credited him with “the invention of the human.” These claims are of course as flawed as they are famous, and they now circulate among reading and critical advice that is aware of and steeped in the challenges of engaging Shakespeare today, such as “How to Love Shakespeare While Talking About Race” (to quote the subtitle of Farah Karim-Cooper’s recent book, The Great White Bard).

Our work will explore these at times paradoxical tensions–the seemingly simultaneous problematics and imperatives of continuing and advancing our interrogations of Shakespeare’s works and their evolving meanings and relevance(s). Throughout the semester we will engage Shakespeare’s plays from multiple critical and methodological perspectives, treating them equally as literary works, as performances and scripts, as textual artifacts, and, increasingly, as media/mediatable forms in the digital (and post human?) age. 

What is Postmodernism? 

Although much postmodern literature resists classification according to traditional literary rubrics, “postmodern” usually refers to “postmodernity,” a period from about 1960 to the present though some argue that postmodernism ended earlier that the present day.  

In literature, postmodern refers us to a set of varied concepts and ideas, stylistic traits, and thematic preoccupations that set the last 65 years apart from earlier literature.  

Through readings, discussions, presentations and writings, we’ll explore how postmodern literature involves not only a continuation, sometimes carried to an extreme, of the counter-traditional experiments of literary modernism, but also diverse attempts to engage ideas, themes and aesthetics/forms that inform our understanding of postmodernity and the postmodern condition. 

We will explore the importance of understanding realism, as well modernism and other avant-garde movements, as a start toward understanding postmodernism. In these contexts, we will work to understand how postmodern literature often aims to subvert the foundations of our accepted modes of thought and experience.  We will also focus on important social, cultural, historical, political and intellectual events and movements that impact and inform postmodernism.