English 117S

Book List

Shakespeare, William : The Norton Shakespeare (3rd edition)

Description

Shakespeare’s poems and plays are relentlessly unsettling, sublimely 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, from George Eliot to Proust, from Emily Dickinson to Louis Zukofsky, from Brecht to Sarah Kane; and for philosophers and theorists such as Hegel, Marx. Freud, Derrida, Kristeva, Lacan, and Zizeck.  We will be especially concerned with six large issues: compassion; political representation and its discontents; the nature of identity and subjectivity; colonialism; Shakespeare’s deviation from conventional dramatic practices;  and the relation between the ways Shakespeare’s plays make meaning and the ways they produce emotional experience.   We will read Titus Andronicus, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, The Merchant of Venice,  Julius Caesar, Henry V, Hamlet, King Lear, Antony and Cleopatra, Coriolanus, and The Tempest.