Immersive study of an author, genre, form, or literary historical issue. Topics vary from term to term.

In this course, students will read quintessential examples of the revenge tragedy genre—The Spanish Tragedy, Hamlet, The Revenger’s Tragedy—as well as seventeenth-century plays that have a more tenuous and provocative relationship to that genre’s structure, themes, and politics—A Woman Killed with Kindness, The Tempest, Samson Agonistes. We will read these plays both as historical documents that capture distinctly early modern anxieties about violence and power in moments of political instability and as provocations that continue to force playgoers and readers to grapple with questions of revenge, violence and non-violence, power, forgiveness, and the capacity of literature to create the conditions for a more just world. Additional readings will include early modern writings on revenge by figures like John Calvin, Francis Bacon, and Thomas Hobbes as well as modern contributions from writers like Judith Butler, Martha Nussbaum, and Sam Harris. Throughout the course, we will attend to issues of free will and predestination, the (il)legitimacy of state violence, and theologies of forgiveness. This class satisfies the pre-1800 requirement for the English major.

Repeat Rules

Requirements class fulfills