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Shakespearean Drama on Page Stage and Screen
Shakespearean Drama on Page, Stage and Screen
Besides a general introduction to Shakespearean drama, the course will focus on interpretation and staging in a historical and contemporary perspective. Theatrical practice in Elizabethan England was more consistent with modern theatre, and yet the general interpretations of Shakespeare still depend on the critics of the Romantic tradition in the late 18th century and early 19th century and their strict division of, for instance, villain/hero and tragedy/comedy, so it appears that we are still in the process of rediscovering the playwright’s original intentions. Texts for the class will be “Hamlet”, “King Lear”, “The Merchant of Venice”, “Twelfth Night”, "Henry V" and “Macbeth”.
Language and Gender
It is a well-known fact that men and women speak differently, not only in modern western societies. What is less clear is why this is so and how linguistic differences are tied to other differences, biological and social. Based on John L. Locke’s Duels and Duets (Cambridge University Press, 2011) and with additional texts by a variety of scholars including Lakoff, Tannen and Cameron, we will try to get a better understanding of the question.
After Empire: Writing the Postcolonial past
This course is introduces students to the history of the British empire through an examination of the many ways of writing the imperial past. It is designed to run parallel with the 3rd semester GU course in postcolonial studies, in order to provide students interested in the historical dimensions of that course with a more thorough contextual and methodological foundation. An overriding theme of the course is the textuality of history-writing. We will examine a wide variety of historical texts, from academic history to 19th century children’s stories, film and fiction, in order to better understand the meaning of ‘colonial discourse’, and its ongoing influence in the way we argue about the past. Students will acquire a broad overview of the origins and evolution of the imperial idea, as well as its legacies in contemporary society. Each student is required to make at least one fifteen minute presentation during the course of the semester. To this end, each week/theme is divided up into three presentation topics. Students will work in groups of three to gather material and prepare for their respective topics, and then present their findings in class. All reading for the course will be based on a course compendium (available at Studenterafdelingen).
New York and the Movies
This course is concerned with New York City’s representation in American cinema since the 1960s. It will situate a select group of films – set and shot in New York – within the history of the city’s urban development and reflect on 1) the ways in which films can be used to explore urban history and change; 2) the multiple (and often contradictory) ways in which filmmakers have chosen to confront, represent, and interpret New York’s urban spaces and social life; and 3) some of the recent approaches in relating cinema to broader histories of urban and socio-cultural change. Ultimately, it will be our business to explore the relationship between two cities: the “real” and the “cinematic” New York, the city as historic reality and geographical formation and the city as filmic experience, cultural fantasy, and idea. Necessarily selective in focus, the course will be organized around different genres and subgenres (crime movies, Blaxploitation films, vigilante movies, romantic comedies), influential directors (Martin Scorsese, Woody Allen, William Friedkin, Spike Lee), and distinct neighborhoods, places, and urban phenomena. Particular emphasis will be placed on the larger structural shifts in New York’s political economy; matters of class, race, ethnicity, and gender; as well as urban transformations resulting from ghettoization, gentrification, zoning, urban privatization, transnational migration, and globalization.
Required reading: Stanley Corkin, Starring New York (N.Y.: Oxford UP, 2011).
Additional texts for discussion will be added and posted on Absalon.
Reinventing th Southern Renaissance
Between roughly 1930 and 1955, the U.S. South experienced a period of significant literary production that was unprecedented in the region’s history. Termed the “Southern Renascence” by one of its leading practitioners and theorists, Allen Tate, this body of work has usually been seen as a literature about history and memory in the post-Civil War South; the traditional (rural, agricultural) South’s encounter with modernity (urbanism, industrialism, capitalism), and with literary modernism; and the South’s unique sense of place
and community.
This course will consider these themes as they are conveyed in the work of leading Renascence writers including Tate, William Faulkner, and Flannery O’Connor. However, we will also explore revisionist readings of the Renaissance. We will consider the ways in which the Agrarians and their disciples invented southern literature, as Michael Kreyling has termed it, along certain ideological lines. We will assess writers who were largely excluded from the Agrarian and neo-Agrarian southern literary canon: for example, African American authors (Richard Wright, Zora Neale Hurston, John O. Killens); writers who took certain explicitly political positions in the context of the period between the Great Depression and the Civil Rights Movement (Lillian Smith, Wright, Killens), and in their representation of poor white southerners (Erskine Caldwell, James Agee); and authors who addressed sexuality in various forms (Smith, Truman Capote).
We will read a range of primary texts (novels, short stories, essays, autobiography), alongside a selection of secondary documents and criticism. Primary texts will be selected from (NB: subject to change): Twelve Southerners, I’ll Take My Stand: The South and the Agrarian Tradition (1930); Allen Tate, The Fathers (1938); William Faulkner, As I Lay Dying (1930); Eudora Welty, A Curtain of Green and Other Stories (1941); Zora Neale Hurston, Jonah’s Gourd Vine (1934); Richard Wright, Uncle Tom’s Children (1938); Erskine Caldwell, Tobacco Road (1932); Erskine Caldwell and Margaret Bourke-White, You Have Seen Their Faces (1937); James Agee and Walker Evans, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941); Truman Capote, Other Voices, Other Rooms (1948); Lillian Smith, Killers of the Dream (1949); Flannery O’Connor, Wise Blood (1952); John Oliver Killens, Youngblood (1954). Secondary critical reading will probably be drawn from Michael Kreyling, Inventing Southern Literature (1998) and Patricia Yaeger, Dirt and Desire: Reconstructing Southern Women’s Writing, 1930-1990 (2000).
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