Jeffrey Knapp
ProfessorChancellor's Professor of English
401 Wheeler
Tu 2-4 and by appt
jknapp@berkeley.edu
Professional Statement
After graduate study at Berkeley, Jeffrey Knapp taught at Harvard for three years before returning to Berkeley in 1990. He chaired the Berkeley English department from 1996 to 1999 and received the campus’s Distinguished Teaching Award in 2002. He is also the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and an NEH Fellowship. His Shakespeare's Tribe (2002) won the Best Book in Literature and Language award from the Association of American Publishers, the Book of the Year award from the Conference on Christianity and Literature, and the Roland H. Bainton Prize for the Best Book in Literature from the Sixteenth Century Society and Conference. Choice named his Shakespeare Only (2009) an Outstanding Academic Title of the year. Knapp is currently a member of the editorial boards for Representations and for Literature Compass.
Specialties
Books
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Shakespeare Only Three decades of controversy in Shakespeare studies can be summed up in a single question: Was Shakespeare one of a kind? On one side of the debate are the Shakespeare lovers, the bardolatrists, who insist on Shakespeare’s timeless preeminence as an author. On the other side are the theater historians who view modern claims of Shakespeare’s uniqueness as a distortion of his real pro.... | |
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Shakespeare's Tribe: Church, Nation, and Theater in Renaissance England Most contemporary critics characterize Shakespeare and his tribe of fellow playwrights and players as resolutely secular, interested in religion only as a matter of politics or as a rival source of popular entertainment. Yet as Jeffrey Knapp demonstrates in this radical new reading, a surprising number of writers throughout the English Renaissance, including Shakespeare himself, represented pla.... | |
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An Empire Nowhere: England, America, and Literature from Utopia to The Tempest What caused England's literary Renaissance? One answer has been that such unprecedented developments as the European discovery of America inspired English writers to "open up new worlds for the imagination." Yet England in the sixteenth century was far from an expanding nation. Not only did the Tudors lose England's sole remaining possessions on the Continent.... |
Selected Publications and Papers Delivered
BOOKS
Shakespeare Only. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009.
Shakespeare's Tribe: Church, Nation, and Theater in Renaissance England. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002.
An Empire Nowhere: England, America, and Literature from Utopia to The Tempest. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992.
ARTICLES
"'Throw That Junk!' The Art of the Movie in Citizen Kane." Forthcoming in Representations.
"Mass Entertainment Before Mass Entertainment." Forthcoming in New Literary History.
"Shakespeare's Pains to Please." In Forms of Association: Making Publics in Early Modern Europe. Ed. Paul Yachnin. Forthcoming, University of Massachusetts Press.
"The Confession of Authorship in Shakespeare's Sonnets." In Word and Rite: Ceremony in Selected Works of Shakespeare. Ed. Beatrice Batson. Cambridge: Cambridge Publishers, 2010.
"Author, King, and Christ in Shakespeare's Histories." In Shakespeare and Religious Change. Ed. Kenneth Graham and Philip Collington. New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2009. 217-37.
"Shakespeare as Coauthor." Shakespeare Studies 36 (2008): 49-59.
"'Sacred Songs, Popular Prices': Secularization in The Jazz Singer." Critical Inquiry 34 (2008): 313-35.
"Religious Pluralization and Single Authorship in Shakespeare's Histories." In Representing Religious Pluralization in Early Modern Europe. Ed. Andreas Höfele et al. Berlin: Lit-Verlag, 2007. 153-73.
"Nations into Persons." In ReReading the Black Legend: The Discourses of Racism in the Renaissance Empires. Ed. Margaret R. Greer, Walter Mignolo, and Maureen Quilligan. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007. 293-311.
"What is a Co-Author?" Representations 89 (2005): 1-29.
“Spenser the Priest.” Representations 81 (2003): 61-78.
“Jonson, Shakespeare, and the Religion of Players.” Shakespeare Survey 54 (2001): 57-70.
“Rogue Nationalism.” In Centuries’ Ends, Narrative Means. Ed. Robert Newman. Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press, 1996. 138-50.
“Preachers and Players in Shakespeare's England.” Representations 44 (Fall 1993): 29-59.
“Elizabethan Tobacco.” Representations 21 (Winter 1988): 26-66.
“Error as a Means of Empire in The Faerie Queene 1.” ELH 54 (Winter 1987): 801-34.
Current Research
Recent English Courses Taught
Spring, 2013
| 117S/1 | Shakespeare |
Shakespeare |
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| 250/2 | Research Seminar: Mass Entertainment |
Graduate Courses |