English 117S

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 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 Žižek. This class focuses on a selection of works from Shakespeare’s entire career. We'll be reading a limited number of plays and some of the poetry. One of the main issues we will focus on is the oscillation between "regular" and "irregular." What is the rule, and what is the exception in Shakespeare's works? How is a comedy supposed to end? How does it end? What makes a tragic hero? What are the rules of theater? What are the rules of literature? Who creates them and why? When do they get transgressed, and why? A tentative reading list includes Titus Andronicus, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, The Merchant of Venice, As You Like It, Troilus and Cressida, King Lear, Antony and Cleopatra, Coriolanus, The Tempest, and a substantial helping of sonnets. We will also screen clips from both stage productions and film versions of the plays.

This course satisfies the Shakespeare requirement for UC Berkeley English majors.

This course will be taught in Session A, from May 22 to June 28.