English 117S

Book List

Greenblatt, S., editor: The Norton Shakespeare, 3rd edition

Description

Shakespeare’s poems and plays are relentlessly unsettling, extravagantly 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 Emily Dickinson 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.  Our reading will include: Titus Andronicus, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, The Merchant of Venice, Julius Caesar, Henry V, Hamlet, Coriolanus, and The Tempest.

If you already own a good edition of the plays (for example, the 1^st or 2^nd edition of The Norton Shakespeare, The Riverside Shakespeare or The Arden Shakespeare), don’t feel at all obliged to buy the 3rd edition of The Norton Shakespeare.  The Norton Shakespeare is available in several formats (single-volume, two-volume, four-volume).  I have ordered the two-volume edition.