Then and Now

Then and Now

The point of this comparative exercise is not to make the self-evident claim that "We still teach Shakespeare" -- or to pretend that our Shakespeare-related offerings are better or more enlightened than those of our predecessors. We stand on their shoulders and still do not see as far as they. Rather, the point is to provide Shakespeare-keyed cross-sections of the curriculum of a large English department at two points in its history. What do they show or suggest? That 2006-7's department has more ink and electricity with which to explain itself than 1961-2's -- and perhaps, too, more constituencies to explain itself to. That 2006-7 is less likely than 1961-2 to take as self-evident the value and meaningfulness of a canon of familiar authors identified by last name. That 2006-7 is acutely context-sensitive, aware of (and excited by) the many competing and intersecting contexts -- historical, social, geographical, cultural, and thematic -- in which writers' works can be placed. That 2006-7 is actively interdisciplinary, sharing with the Departments of Comparative Literature and of Theatre, Film, and Dance the job of studying writers and texts that are to be compared and performed, connected and enacted. And that in the present, Shakespeare remains central to a multi-centric curriculum, no less unified by its variety than the English Department by its diversity. You can learn more about undergraduate and graduate course offerings at http://www.arts.cornell.edu/english/courses/.
1961-2	2006-7
Courses for Freshmen English 111-112. INTRODUCTORY COURSES IN READING AND WRITING. Throught the year. Credit three hours a term. Open to freshmen. Mr. Elias, Mr. Smith, and others. The aim is to increase the student's ability to communicate his own thought and to understand the thought of others. English 113-114. INTRODUCTION TO LITERATURE Throught the year. Credit three hours a term. Mr. Sale and others. An introductory course in the study of various forms of literature. For freshmen who are candidates for advanced credit as attested by Advanced Placement Examinations or by distinguished work in secondary schools . . . . At the end of the first term, students whose writing meets the standards of the course will be recommended for three hours of advanced standing credit in English composition.	First-year Writing Seminars ENGL 127 Shakespeare [First-year Writing Seminar. Three sections, fall 2006. Four sections, spring 2007.] This seminar provides a unique opportunity for students to work very closely with just a few of Shakespeare's plays: a total of four or five over the course of the semester. We will use these texts as a source and motivation for our own reading, writing, and critical analysis, but we will be attentive also to the plays as performances. Film screenings, performances, and historical materials related to the plays in production will be included in each seminar, though the particulars will vary according to the instructor. Course work will involve extensive writing -- both formal and informal -- and drafting. ENGL 185.9 Writing About Literature: "Base, Common, and Popular": Shakespeare in Film and Fiction [First-year Writing Seminar, spring 2007. J. Mann] Shakespeare has long been a fixture of highbrow culture, but his works are also continually being reinvented in global popular culture -- evident most recently in an explosion of comic book, film, and television adaptations. What does it mean to be "Shakespearean" in this context? In answering this question, this course will investigate how three plays have been adapted and performed since the seventeenth century: Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet, and The Tempest. In addition to studying each play, we will analyze literary appropriations such as Tom Stoppard's Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead and Aimé Césaire's A Tempest, as well as film adaptations such as Baz Luhrmann's William Shakespeare's Romeo & Juliet, Michael Almereyda's Hamlet, and Forbidden Planet. Writing assignments will include critical essays and shorter response papers. ENGLISH 185.13 Writing About Literature: Shakespeare's History Plays [First-year Writing Seminar, spring 2007. C. Ruff] Let us sit upon the ground and tell sad stories of the deaths of kings, and then get up and act them out, and write about the experience afterwards! We'll consider how we understand Shakespeare's plays about England's medieval kings as independent literary creations and as a sequence with linked themes; how our understanding of language, character, and action is informed by performing the text and studying performances on film; what it meant to put the crises of a kingdom on stage in Shakespeare's time and what it has meant in more recent times. Our written work will be devoted in equal measure to analysis of the texts of the plays and to reflections on the experience of engaging the plays as actors and audience. ENGL 271 The Reading of Poetry [First-year Writing Seminar. 3 credits. 1 section, fall and spring.] How can we become more appreciative, alert readers of poetry, and at the same time better writers of prose? This course attends to the rich variety of poems written in English, drawing on the works of poets from William Shakespeare to Sylvia Plath, John Keats to Li-Young Lee, Emily Dickinson to A. R. Ammons. We may read songs, sonnets, odes, villanelles, even limericks. By engaging in thorough discussions and varied writing assignments, we will explore some of the major periods, modes, and genres of English poetry, and in the process expand the possibilities of our own writing. This course does not satisfy requirements for the English major. ENGL 272 The Reading of Drama [First-year Writing Seminar. 3 credits. 4 sections, fall and spring] In this course we will study and write critically about plays, older and newer, in a variety of dramatic idioms and cultural traditions. We will practice close, interpretive reading of texts and pay attention to their possibilities for live and filmed performance. Readings will include works by such playwrights as Sophocles and Shakespeare, Arthur Miller and Caryl Churchill, Ntosake Shange and Tony Kushner and some drama criticism and performance theory. Attendance at screenings and at live productions by the Theatre Department may be required. This course does not satisfy requirements for the English major.
Surveys English 251-252. GREAT ENGLISH WRITERS Through the year. Credit three hours a term. English 251 prerequisite to English 252. Mr. Abrams and Staff. Studies in selected works of great English writers, Chaucer to the twentieth century. Open to all students who have completed the requirement in English composition: those who intend to major in English should take this course in the sophomore year. English 254. BRITISH LITERATURE. Spring term. Credit 3 hours. Not open to students who have taken English 251. Mr. Healey. A study of works by notable English, Scottish, and Irish authors from the time of Chaucer to that of Boswell.	Surveys ENGL 201 The English Literary Tradition Fall. 4 credits. D. Fried. An introduction to the study of English literature, examining its historical development and achievements from its beginnings to the middle of the 17th century. Readings will include Beowulf and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight in modern translation, selections from Chaucer's Canterbury Tales and the writings of medieval women. Book 1 of Spenser's Faerie Queen, Elizabethan sonnets, a play by Shakespeare, poems by Donne, Marvell, and Herbert, and selections from Milton's Paradise Lost. Lectures are supplemented by small discussion groups once a week.
Primarily Shakespeare English 369 SHAKESPEARE Fall term. Credit three hours. Mr Mizener. An introduction to the works of Shakespeare based on a selection of plays representative of the stages of his artistic development and the range of his achievement. English 470. SHAKESPEARE Either term. Credit three hours. Prerequisite, English 340 or 369. Open to seniors, and to juniors with the consent of the instructor. Fall term, Mr Smith. Spring Term, Mr. Caputi. An intensive study of three or four of Shakespeare's plays.	Primarily Shakespeare ENGL 227 Shakespeare (also THETR 277) Fall. 4 credits. B. Correll A lecture and discussion course that offers students a survey of representative Shakespearean comedies, tragedies, and history plays. Our study will include attention to forms, themes, and historical contexts, including history of the early modern English Theatre. We read nine plays, including The Merchant of Venice, Twelfth Night, The Tempest, Othello, King Lear, Richard II, Henry IV Part One, and Henry V. ENGL 208 Shakespeare and the 20th Century Spring. 4 credits. S. Davis What can we learn about Shakespeare's plays from their reception in the 20th and 21st centuries? What can we learn about modern cultures from their appropriations of these texts? We will study four or five plays and their adaptations in film and theater and explore the uses made of Shakespeare in education, advertising, and public culture and by the "Shakespeare industry" itself. For spring 2007, tentatively: Titus Andronicus, Twelfth Night, Merchant of Venice, Hamlet, and Macbeth, together with Tom Stoppard's Dogg's Hamlet, Cahoot's Macbeth and films directed by Michael Radford, Trevor Nunn, Julie Taymor, Grigori Kozintsev, Michael Almereyda, and Akira Kurosawa. ENGL 349 Shakespeare and Europe (also COM L 348) Fall. 4 credits. W. Kennedy. In their own era, Shakespeare's plays registered a strong interest in the culture and society of renaissance Europe beyond England. In later arial, they cast a powerful spell over culture and society in 19th- and 20th-century Europe. This course will examine their debts to and influences upon continental drama. Readings will focus upon Shakespeare's plays in relation to Italian comedy, early French tragedy, and plays by Anton Chekhov, Bertold Brecht, and Yasmina Reza. ENGL 445 Shakespeare in (Con)Text. (also THETR 446, VSST 446) Spring. 4 credits. B. Levitt. This course will examine how collaboration among stage directors, designers, and actors leads to differing intrpretations of the plays. The course focuses on how the texts themselves are blueprints for productions with particular emphasis on the choices available to the actor inherent in the text.
Genre and period English 309 THE LATER RENAISSANCE Fall term. Three credit hours. Mr. Edwards. The main traditions in poetry and prose from Spenser to Marvell. English 410 ELIZABETHANS AND METAPHYSICALS Spring term. Credit three hours. Mr. Adams. Three credit hours. The main poetic traditions of the late sixteenth and seventeenth century, with special attention to Spenser, Jonson, Donne, Herbert, Marvell, and Dryden.	Genre, period, or special topics ENGL 375 Studies in Drama and Theatre: Enemies: A "Love" Story (also THETR 375) Fall. 4 credits. P. Lorenz. The birth of modern drama has been linked to the staging of interpersonal relationships, and in particular to relations of conflict, struggle, and hostility. Very often the hero of drama is at odds with an enemy. But what is an enemy? Is he personal or political, racial or religious? Is he a he, and if so, is there any escaping him? The course focuses on the figure of the enemy in plays by Shakespeare, Marlowe, Kyd, Brecht, Ibsen, Bruckner, Miller, and Wilson, while considering various conceptual models of enmity, from the Bible through Marx and Freud. How are these models responded to or resisted in drama from the Renaissance through the twentieth century? ENGL 421 Advanced Seminar in the Renaissance: Literature, Science and Renaissance Curiosities Fall. 4 credits. J. Mann. Francis Bacon, the first philosopher of English science, vowed "to trust nothing but on the faith of my eyes." Bacon's declaration became a central tenet of philosophical inquiry during the seventeenth century, as gentlemen began to collect specimens, dissect bodies, and survey the physical universe. This course will explore how the methods of the new experimental "science" reverberated in--and were challenged by--literary productions in the age of Shakespeare and Milton. We will also consider the representation of figures subject to the developing scientific gaze: curiosities such as the hermaphrodite, the Amazon, and the African. Our syllabus will include works of imaginative literature (Golding, Shakespeare, Beaumont, Donne, Wroth, Milton) as well as medical texts and works of natural philosophy (Paré, Duval, Bacon, Harvey, Cavendish). ENGL 422 Renaissance "Traffick" Spring. 4 credits. R. Kalas. This course loods at the various forms of traffic and exchange -- in words, books, goods, and persons -- that shaped the literary culture of the Renaissance in Britain. How did writers respond to new modes of mercantile exchange; new forms of commercial theatre and print culture; and new ideas about the transmission of property? And what is the role of literary innovation in these kinds of social and historical transformation? We'll be asking, ultimately, how a notion of literary traffic might refine our understanding of the foundations of transatlantic Anglo-American culture. Readings will include plays by Shakespeare, Massinger, and Jonson; Marlowe's Hero and Leander, Milton's Samson Agonistes, and other poems by Donne, Marvell, and Isabella Whitney; and prose selections from Bacon, Bradford, Rowlandson, and Coryat's Crudities. ENGL 423 Renaissance Lyric Spring. 4 credits. B. Correll. This course is about Renaissance poetry and the issues of studying it, including forms like sonnets and psalms, technicques, influences, cultural contexts. Reading covers major authors such as Surrey, Wyatt, Sidney, Spenser, Shakespeare, and Donne, and others, including women writers, who also participated in developing early modern poetry. We look at rhetoric handbooks, debates on poetry, and important scholarship. While the topic of sixteenth-century lyric is historically specific, this seminar is aimed at anyone with an interest in lyric poetry, regardless of background or preparation, willing to work collectively to talk about lyric, interested in what might be at stake in readiing early modern lyric.
Graduate English 493. SHAKESPEARE'S LAST PLAYS Fall term. Credit three hours. Mr. Mizener.	Graduate ENGL 627 Studies in Shakespeare: Shakespeare and Marlowe (also THETR 627) Fall. 4 credits. B. Correll. This course brings together two of the most striking and powerful writers of the early modern period. Their work in drama and in verse, innovative and path-breaking, provokes questions not only about their historical relationship and the historical setting in which they wrote but also about issues of power (including that of classical authority), gender and sexuality, the historical subject, nation and empire. Texts include The Jew of Malta, Merchant of Venice, Dido Queen of Carthage, Antony and Cleopatra, Tamburlaine I and II, Richard III, Edward II, Richard II, Hero and Leander, Venus and Adonis. One goal of the seminar is to establish a larger context for study of both writers and their reception. Reading in primary sources -- Ovid, Virgil, Plutarch -- will also be assigned.
Many thanks to Darlene Flint and Marianne Marsh for their help in preparing this digest, and the whole feature. Complaints and comments to SD, 12 December 2007.