ENG5200HF L0101
Early Modern Critical Race Studies
Chakravarty, U.
Course Description:
This course has three main aims: firstly, to explore and analyze a range of early modern texts, from plays and poems to travel narratives and maps, which trace the landscape of early modern racial ideologies, frameworks and constructions; secondly, to read, engage and think with key works in the field of critical race studies; and finally, to map the history and terrain of early modern critical race studies and think about its future directions. Students will analyze and engage with the multiple registers of premodern race and its implications for discussions of nation, empire and slavery; family and conduct; religion and class; gender and sexuality; archives and material texts; capitalism and commodity; colour, embodiment and the somatic. We shall also think about questions of reception, representation and appropriation, placing early modern race in conversation with contemporary contexts.
Course Reading List:
Primary texts may include: Behn, Oroonoko; Jonson, The Masque of Blackness; Marlowe, The Jew of Malta; Shakespeare, Othello; The Merchant of Venice; The Tempest; Spenser, A View of the Present State of Ireland; Milton, Paradise Lost. Theoretical and critical readings may include work by Patricia Akhimie, Kimberlé Crenshaw, Kim F. Hall, Geraldine Heng, Jennifer Morgan, Hortense Spillers, Ayanna Thompson and Sylvia Wynter, among others. (Subject to change.)
Method of Evaluation and Course Requirements: [NB: SGS requires that participation grade must not exceed 20% of total grade]
TBA
Term: F-TERM (September 2024 to December 2024)
Date/Time: Tuesday 3:00 pm to 6:00 pm (3 hours)
Location: TBA
Delivery: In-Person
ENG5201HF L0101
Early Modern Literature and the Crisis of Representation
Rogers, J.
Course Description:
A newly expanded concept of representation emerged in seventeenth-century England to structure what strike us now as two wholly distinct realms of concern: that of semantics (how does a word represent, or signify, a thing?) and politics (in what way does a civil magistrate, a political assembly, or a church legitimately represent, speak for, or govern a nation?). This course proposes an examination of seventeenth-century English poetry and prose in light of the fractious new theories of linguistic and political representation that informed or occasioned them. These theories, as we will discover, also invited the generation of some strikingly new literary modes and forms: the treatise of political and religious obligation, the utopian fantasy, the Biblical tragedy, the devotional poem, the speculative essay, and the “realist” allegorical quest narrative. Authors studied include Bacon, Herbert, Hobbes, Milton, Crashaw, Browne, Cavendish, and Bunyan. The term’s investigation of the struggles over what it means to represent, signify, or govern will culminate in an analysis of Restoration England's heavily politicized Universal and Artificial Language Movement, with its signal expression in John Wilkins's 1668 Essay Towards a Real Character and a Philosophical Language.
Course Reading List:
Bacon’s The New Atlantis and The Great Instauration; Browne’s Urn Burial and The Garden of Cyrus; Bunyan’s Pilgrim's Progress; Cavendish’s Blazing World and Observations upon Experimental Philosophy; Crashaw’s Steps to the Temple; Herbert’s The Temple; Milton’s “Lycidas” and Tenure of Kings and Magistrates; Hobbes’ Leviathan; and Wilkins’s Essay Towards a Real Character and a Philosophical Language
Method of Evaluation and Course Requirements:[NB: SGS requires that participation grade must not exceed 20% of total grade]
- 25% shorter essay 6-8 pages,
- 60% longer essay 13-15 pages,
- 15% class participation
Term: F-TERM (September 2024 to December 2024)
Date/Time: Friday 2:00 pm to 4:00 pm (2 hours)
Location: TBA
Delivery: In-Person
ENG5202HS L0101
Shakespeare's Tragedies
Magnusson, L.
Course Description:
This course affords an opportunity for seminar members to read Shakespeare’s tragedies in dialogue with the extraordinarily rich tradition of criticism on the tragedies. Each seminar meeting will focus on a specific tragedy, opening up four areas of discussion. (1) The first topic concerns the structure and larger architecture of each play, considering such topics as generic experimentation, imitation and invention, and elements of plot construction oriented to thematic, rhetorical, or theatrical effect. (2) The second identifies and interrogates major issues that have arisen in the critical conversation, whether interpretive, textual, contextual, or performative. (3) The third focus of discussion will be close reading, experimenting with various rhetorical, linguistic, or critical approaches to a selected scene or episode. (4) Finally, looking to the present and future, we consider new directions and emerging (or unimagined) topics, asking what might constitute productive routes for fresh research. The course should be of interest to all those planning graduate research in Shakespeare and early modern literature, to potential teachers, and to those interested in Shakespeare’s exceptional literary achievement.
Course Reading List:
Texts will include: Titus Andronicus, Romeo and Juliet, Richard III, Julius Caesar, Othello, King Lear, Timon of Athens, Macbeth, Antony and Cleopatra, and Coriolanus (or selection thereof), supplemented by critical readings.
Method of Evaluation and Course Requirements: [NB: SGS requires that participation grade must not exceed 20% of total grade]
Seminar members will exchange short email “issue” sheets and/or brief “First Word” presentations reflecting on the weekly plays and topics (20%), present one twenty-minute seminar (25%), participate actively in class discussion (10%), and develop a short colloquium paper (possibly for a final class mini-conference), submitting a written version of about 12 pages (10% + 35% = 45%).
Term: S-TERM (January 2025 to April 2025)
Date/Time: Monday 3:00 pm to 6:00 pm (3 hours)
Location: TBA
Delivery: In-Person
ENG5203HS L0101
Shakespeare's Theatrical (After)Lives
Syme, H. S.
Course Description:
In this course we will investigate how the texts, meanings, and ideological affordances of Shakespeare's plays have been shaped and reinvented by successive generations of theatre artists from the seventeenth to the twenty-first centuries. With a focus on Anglophone theatre, primarily in Britain and the US, we will trace how and why certain plays by Shakespeare disappear from the repertory and reemerge at other times, even as Shakespeare (in markedly different configurations) remained central to the Anglophone theatrical tradition over the centuries. Our investigations will focus on two related issues: on the one hand, the changing status of the text in discussions and practices of theatre making, and the effects of the rise of the scholarly textual editor on theatrical practices; and on the other hand, the ways in which Shakespeare’s plays have functioned as occasions for negotiating questions of gender, race, and nationalist politics.
Course Reading List:
Plays including (but not limited to) Hamlet, Othello, Midsummer Night's Dream, The Merchant of Venice, and Richard III; archival materials ranging from 18th-century prompt books to contemporary stage managers' accounts from Shakespeare's Globe; works by scholars including Barbara Hodgdon, Peter Holland, Robert Hornback, M. J. Kidnie, Judith Pascoe, Richard Schoch, Ayanna Thompson, and many others.
Method of Evaluation and Course Requirements:
Assessment:
Final paper 40%
Conference-style final presentation 15%
Paper proposal and brief annotated bibliography 10%
Assigned reading presentation 15%
Participation 20%
Term: S-TERM (January 2025 to April 2025)
Date/Time: Thursday 3:00 pm to 6:00 pm (3 hours)
Location: TBA
Delivery: In-Person