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Course Criteria
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3.00 Credits
In this course we will read several of Shakespeare's plays (including tragedies, comedies, and romances), as well as a number of contemporary "re-visions" of those works by authors of varying cultural, ethnic, or gender backgrounds. The purpose of this course will consequently be fourfold: first, to gain an in-depth understanding of one of our most important writers, particularly in relation to his own time period; second, to discover what qualities, vision, dilemmas, and/or artistry keep this author very much alive; third, to examine the various ways in which contemporary authors are modifying, if not codifying Shakespeare's work in their own important new works; and last, to develop the critical skills and vocabulary for discussing and writing about these issues and texts. At the end of the course, you should have a firm grasp of several important literary works, from the Renaissance to the twentieth century, a sophisticated idea of how literature both reifies and resists seminal literature which has come before it, and finally a sense of how the issues raised in this literary "confluence" are important in the actual world and in our lives.
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3.00 Credits
An intensive study of Beowulf and the critical literature surrounding it. We will first read the poem in translation, then move slowly through the text in Old English, addressing the key problems and questions that have dominated recent scholarship. Previous experience reading Old English will be necessary. Requirements include regular reading and contribution to class discussion, a lexicography project, a translation exercise, and a research paper.
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3.00 Credits
What are King Lear's last words? In performances at the Globe, what did Hamlet do when he argued with Laertes? What were the costumes worn by the ghost of Hamlet's father and why? If Viola in Twelfth Night was played by a boy-actor, what changes? What happens in recent Japanese productions of Hamlet? What is Shakespeare like on YouTube? This course will explore productions of Shakespeare plays from Shakespeare''s own theatre to 2011. We will see live productions as well as web-streamed versions in many languages and from all over the world. We will see what can be recovered of early modern production methods and of 18th century adaptations. We will, occasionally, use our lab time to watch films and tv versions but the lab will not be required ever week. The aim throughout will be to investigate the history of the text of Shakespeare plays and some of the myriad ways in which the plays have been translated into performance across time and space.
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3.00 Credits
An examination of the ways in which Jonathan Swift regarded the non-literary arts in eighteenth-century Ireland and England - gardening, music, architecture, and painting - and how his views on those art forms are reflected in his poetry and prose.
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3.00 Credits
The instruments of modern capitalism (including the Bank of England and a stock market) were invented at the end of the seventeenth century. The eighteenth century experiences the complexities and shocks of that system. The South Sea Bubble in England with the remarkable crash of the South Sea Company in 1720 gave the world its first lesson in a stock market crash. The feudal class system is pressed and reshaped to follow the nature of money. Theories about liberty cannot rightly ignore financial pressure, and personal freedom is deeply affected by relationships to money. Novelists, dramatists and poets of the late 17th and the 18th century examine a variety of forms of wealth and loss, and observe the startling effects of gains and losses of those at the bottom or the top of the social pyramid. Male and female authors observe the price and significance of luxury goods (silk, mohair, diamonds, and coaches) and of new pleasures (coffee and tea drinking, card parties); they also follow the cost of bare necessities (a loaf of bread). Slavery is part of the economic dynamic, and the new system amplifies slavery in bringing to the fore such new staples as sugar, tobacco and cotton. Gambling assumes a central role; public projects are funded by lotteries. Marriage is deeply involved in speculation. ("Speculation" is the name of a real game introduced to her family by Jane Austen.) We will examine the work of theorists such as Adam Smith and Malthus, as well as a variety of poems plays and novels from Bunyan to Austen dealing with social patterns and individual experiences of prosperity or loss.
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3.00 Credits
How 17th Century British poetry defined its milieu.
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3.00 Credits
Readings of drama written during the English Romantic period.
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3.00 Credits
An exploration of the intersections between the local, the national, and the global in well-known and lesser-known works of British Romantic era literature including fiction, drama, poetry, journalism, travel writing, abolitionist writing, political prose, and women writers.
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3.00 Credits
Burke, Paine, Godwin, Wordsworth, Edgeworth, and Scott in the context of the French Revolution and the Irish political situation at the end of the 18th century.
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3.00 Credits
An introduction to modernism as it formed in Europe.
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