English N117S

Book List

Greenblatt, S., ed.: The Norton Shakespeare

Description

Shakespeare’s poems and plays are relentlessly unsettling, crazy beautiful, deeply moving, rigorously brilliant, and compulsively meaningful: they complicate everything, they simplify nothing, and for 400 years, they have been a touchstone—indeed, something like an obsession—for literary artists from Milton to Goethe to George Eliot to Joyce to Brecht to Zukofsky to Sarah Kane and for philosophers and theorists from Hegel to Marx to Freud to Derrida to Lacan to Zizeck.  We will be especially concerned with five large issues: compassion; political representation and its discontents; the nature of identity and subjectivity; colonialism; and the relation between the ways Shakespeare’s plays make meaning and the ways they produce emotional experience. 

If you own a good complete Shakespeare (Norton, Riverside, Pelican), you need not purchase the edition that I have ordered for the class.

This course satisfies the Shakespeare requirement for the English major.

This course will be taught in Session D, which runs from July 7 to August 15.