2024 Fall ENGLISH 117S 001 LEC 001

2024 Fall

ENGLISH 117S 001 - LEC 001

Shakespeare

Oliver Maxwell Arnold

Aug 28, 2024 - Dec 13, 2024
Mo, We
05:00 pm - 06:29 pm
Class #:26830
Units: 4

Instruction Mode: In-Person Instruction

Offered through English

Current Enrollment

Total Open Seats: 1
Enrolled: 199
Waitlisted: 0
Capacity: 200
Waitlist Max: 25
No Reserved Seats

Hours & Workload

2 to 3 hours of instructor presentation of course materials per week, 9 hours of outside work hours per week, and 1 to 0 hours of the exchange of opinions or questions on course material per week.

Final Exam

FRI, DECEMBER 20TH
03:00 pm - 06:00 pm
Dwinelle 145

Other classes by Oliver Maxwell Arnold

Course Catalog Description

Lectures on Shakespeare and reading of his best works.

Class Description

Shakespeare’s plays are relentlessly unsettling, sublimely beautiful, deeply moving, rigorously brilliant, and compulsively meaningful: they complicate everything; they simplify nothing. As we puzzle over the way Shakespeare represents compassion, desire, identity, republicanism, colonialism, racism, freedom and unfreedom, and work, we will keep two overarching questions percolating: how does Shakespeare conceive theater (its uses, its value)?; and what makes Shakespeare SHAKESPEARE? That is, what makes Shakespeare distinctive and what makes him a strange colossus, a touchstone for literary artists from Milton to Goethe, from George Eliot to Proust, from Emily Dickinson to Sarah Kane, from Brecht to Toni Morrison and for philosophers and theorists such as Hegel, Marx. Freud, Derrida, Kristeva, Lacan, and Zizeck? We will read a few handfuls of sonnets and roughly a dozen plays, including The Merchant of Venice, Julius Caesar, Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Antony and Cleopatra, Coriolanus, and The Tempest. We will also devote some class time to watching scenes from films and filmed performances of the plays. Requirements: one short assignment, which will include creative options; an in-person midterm; a final paper; and an in-person final exam.

Class Notes

Book List

I have ordered the third edition of The Norton Shakespeare (ed. Stephen Greenblatt et al; ISBN: 978-0393264029). If you already own another complete Shakespeare (e.g., The Riverside, The Pelican, the first or second edition of The Norton Shakespeare, etc.), you are welcome to .. show more
Book List

I have ordered the third edition of The Norton Shakespeare (ed. Stephen Greenblatt et al; ISBN: 978-0393264029). If you already own another complete Shakespeare (e.g., The Riverside, The Pelican, the first or second edition of The Norton Shakespeare, etc.), you are welcome to use it for this course. Good single-play editions—Signet, Folger, Arden, Oxford World Classics, Pelican, Cambridge—would also serve you well. show less

Rules & Requirements

Repeat Rules

Course is not repeatable for credit.

Requirements class fulfills

Meets Arts & Literature, L&S Breadth

Reserved Seats

Current Enrollment

No Reserved Seats

Textbooks & Materials

See class syllabus or https://calstudentstore.berkeley.edu/textbooks for the most current information.

Textbook Lookup

Guide to Open, Free, & Affordable Course Materials

eTextbooks

Associated Sections

None