This seminar is designed to provide English majors with intensive and closely supervised work in critical reading and writing. Although sections of the course may address any literary question, period, or genre, they all provide an introduction to critical and methodological problems in literary studies.

How on earth have Shakespeare's 400-year-old plays accumulated the status (or "cultural capital") they enjoy today? What does it mean to interpret these old texts in our terms, and is it right to do so? What makes us think we haven't by now exhausted everything there could be to say about these plays? We'll examine the development of Shakespeare criticism, which is the backbone of the history of literary criticism in English. We'll consider how key terms from that long history resonate with some crucial concepts of 21st-century cultural critique. We'll focus on five case studies, drawing on recent filmed productions as well as on written criticism: subjectivity and power in Hamlet; intertextuality and desire in A Midsummer Night's Dream; performativity and gender in As You Like It; racecraft and commodity in Othello; theatricality and colonialism in The Tempest. Students will write a shorter paper engaging some criticism of Hamlet, and then develop a more extensive intervention into another of our critical debates. This class fulfills the English 100 requirement for the major; it does not fulfill the Shakespeare requirement.

Book List:

Shakespeare: Hamlet, A Midsummer Night's Dream, As You Like It, Othello, The Tempest (all freely available to students through library resources)

Repeat Rules

Requirements class fulfills