English: Shakespeare: Theater & Society (A)

About ENGL 2322 A

Examines Shakespeare's works in intellectual, historical, aesthetic contexts. Topics: Shakespeare and Philosophy; Engendering Shakespeare; Shakespeare and Renaissance Drama. May be repeated for credit with different content. Topics vary by offering; periodic offering at intervals that may exceed four years. Prerequisites: Three hours in English numbered 1010 to 1990; minimum Sophomore standing.

Notes

Prerequisites: Three hours in English numbered 1010 to 1990; minimum Sophomore standing. System waitlisting enabled for this section

Section Description

The full title of this course is “Shakespeare: Theater and Society.” Let’s break that down a bit:
• “Shakespeare,” of course, is William Shakespeare, the Elizabethan poet and playwright. You’ll be learning plenty about him in this course, and I’m pretty sure he’ll surprise you more than once.
• “Theater,” can mean the actual physical playhouses, or the way things are done on the stages of those playhouses, or the people associated with those playhouses, or the culture of theatricality that circulates within and around those playhouses, or the theatrical texts themselves. We’ll spend time with all of those theatrical concepts, but, this being an English course, we’ll spend most of our time on the latter – how do these texts work? That is, how do they work at the level of language and embodiment?
• Then there’s “Society”; that concept is even more capacious than “theater.” There’s Elizabethan society, of course, which is tied up in profound and complex ways with the theater (in all its forms). But there is also our society, as in, America in 2027. These plays and poems are our texts now. And so we look not only for how they resonated in early modern England, but we bring them with us into our own moment and find that they live with us in a way that goes far beyond simply an encounter with the past. It’s a much more active and reciprocal relationship than we might initially expect from texts that are over 400 years old and not American.

It’s work, all this thinking that we’ll be doing. But it’s good work, even important work, and it will take many forms. You’ll read critically (silently and aloud); you’ll watch critically; you’ll listen critically; you’ll write critically (where “critical” means the intellectually disciplined and creative process of actively, carefully, thoughtfully, even speculatively, observing, interpreting, and performing texts in ways that matter).
And throughout it all, we’ll pay attention to each other with kindness and patience and good humor and in the generous spirit of human inquiry these amazing texts inspire.

Section Expectation

In this course, it is my hope (and expectation) that we will

• Relish the opportunity to do a deep dive into a few texts
• Foster an intellectual community in the classroom that invites and supports a variety of viewpoints and genuine critical thinking
• Write well (without the use of generative AI) and with purpose
• Analyze the way literary form works to create meaning that goes far beyond the text itself
• Practice (and enjoy) reading literature aloud
• Wade into a variety of critical approaches to the same text
• Consider deeply the relationship between language/performance and society
• Speculate about what motivates our cultural preferences for certain kinds of stories
• Experience a sense of wonder at the often remarkable relevance of early modern texts in our own time and space

Evaluation

Specifics about assignments TBA. But students can expect regular weekly writing in the form of a Response Journal, at least two formal written assignments, and potentially one performance assignment, and a final exam.

Important Dates

Note: These dates may change before registration begins.

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Resources

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