Course details

Name: ENGL - 494

Title: SEMINAR IN ENGLISH LITERATURE: SHAKESPEARE ON FILM

Section: 41

Semester: Summer - 2020

Credits: 3

Description:
This course will be taught as a synchronous on-line course in the 1st 4-week Summer Session (14W), May 18-June 11. CRN# 30398.

During the first half of this course, we will view and discuss specific critical scenes in different film versions of Macbeth, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and King Lear, with attention to the ways in which the director’s and/or the actors’ interpretations of the texts alter the audience’s reception of the play. How do films manipulate such reception? How does our sense of “Shakespeare” depend upon such manipulation? Students will read the text of each play to establish their own contexts for viewing the films. The objective in this half of the course is to create an awareness of the flexibility (or instability) of text and audience reception in regard to “Shakespeare” as both an “industry” and a cultural artifact.

The second half of the course looks at adaptations of Shakespeare in films that maneuver his plots and dialogue into more complex contexts. These recent productions indicate radical changes in the ways in which we have taken cultural “ownership” of Shakespeare. These include such films as My Own Private Idaho , Men of Respect, Looking for Richard, The Children‘s Midsummer Night’s Dream, Scotland,PA, and Renaissance Man which point to something new and not yet critically defined or “canonized.” Thus the class will try to create its own collective and individual definition of this emerging “ownership.”

Students will keep a journal recording their informed responses to both the plays read and the films seen. These journals and participation in class discussions form the basis for the final grade in the course.

 

Last updated on 2020-04-07 By Liebler Naomi (lieblern)

Schedule: Monday,Tuesday,Wednesday,Thursday From 1:00 pm To 3:45 pm

Graduation requirements:

  • Any Literature (1e)
  • Genre Study (Drama)
  • Shakespeare (TE 1a)
  • Pre-1700 (1a)
  • Pre-1800 (1b)
  • Pre-1900 (1c)
  • Women and Gender Studies (3c)
  • Class Issues (3d)
  • Pre-1800 British (TE 1b)

Teaching Faculty: Liebler Naomi (lieblern)

Is course canceled: No