ENGL 240 - Shakespeare

Semester Offered: Fall
1 unit(s)

Study of some representative comedies, histories, and tragedies.

Topic for 2024/25a: Shakespeare, Our Collaborator. Throughout his career, Shakespeare dramatized the biases, racial thinking, and gender inequalities that continue to divide our society today. He’s long been weaponized to affirm these oppressive structures too. How, then, might we approach Shakespeare in an age when including him on syllabi demands reasons better than simply his universality, humanity, and (yes, it’s true) heartstopping verse? This class experiments with one possibility: reading him “bravely,” as Farah Karim-Cooper puts it, “contend[ing]” with his texts and “jumping[ing] inside the plays.” That is, we’ll frame Shakespeare as a collaborator: someone who not simply was of his own time but also invites us to make his texts mean something in ours, who galvanizes adaptation and reimagination, and who is more valuable for thinking with than studying for prefabricated precepts. This Shakespeare never puts the answers in the back of the book. He’s more interrogative and enigmatic, leaving interpretive openings for us to dwell within. Our goal, then, is to discover these chasms, appreciate how they’ve invited the creative energies of thinkers for centuries now, and learn how we too can use Shakespeare for ourselves—in close readings, public writing, and creative responses—rather than venerate him as a fustian old relic, never to be taken down from the shelf. In other words, as we attend to the verbal particulars and structural intricacies of his plays—as we explore the shape and staggering generic variety of his career—we rethink what the role of that career should be in our own lives and world moving forward. Pasquale Toscano.

Not open to students who have taken ENGL 241.

This course satisfies either the REGS requirement or the pre-1800 requirement for the English major.

Two 75-minute periods.

Course Format: CLS