Shakespeare or What You Will

3 Credits · Level: Graduate, Undergraduate

MA Course: Responding to Shakespeare, or What You Will This course will introduce students to a wide variety of critical and creative responses to the works of William Shakespeare and ask students to collaborate with the instructor on the development of their own projects and the content of the course. Participants will meet with the instructor at the beginning of the semester to select a Shakespeare text and an area of interest. Some possible topics include: literary or popular re-writings of Shakespeare’s plays, including the student's creative adaptation of a Shakespeare play or poem, Shakespeare in performance, Shakespeare in film, editing Shakespeare, digital Shakespeare, theoretical approaches to Shakespeare (genre, race, gender, queer, disability, historicist, psychoanalytic, material culture, religion, animal studies, eco-critical, etc.), global/translation of Shakespeare, etc. We will begin the semester by reading a play and considering it from the perspectives of literary criticism, theater history/performance, and adaptation. In the course of the semester, students will post weekly responses to the assigned reading, produce a close reading of their chosen play, learn research skills from a library instruction, develop an annotated bibliography, select a reading deriving from their research interests to place on the syllabus, make presentations of their project in class, and produce a substantial final essay/adaptation on a topic of their own devising.