ENGL 552 Seminar in Drama: Hamlet Reincarnated
Dr. Lincoln Knonkle
Summer Session 2: June 13, 2022-July 14, 2022
This course will be taught in the Remote Format
In this seminar we will study Shakespeare’s Hamlet: quarto and folio versions of it, sources for it, and adaptations of it. More specifically, after studying the conflated text most of us have read, we will read the Q2 and folio versions of Hamlet. Then we will read these sources or models Shakespeare may have used: Saxo Grammaticus’ “The Life of Hamlet” (handout), Belleforest’s “The History of Hamlet” (in the Bantam Hamlet), and Thomas Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy. Finally, we will read adaptations such as Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead and possibly John Updike’s Gertrude and Claudius. And we will view film adaptations (e.g., Olivier’s, Zeferelli’s, Branagh’s, perhaps another one or two).
ENGL 650 American Literature to 1800
Dr. Michele Tarter
This class meets in the online learning format. Meetings at 10:00am-1:00pm on Monday May 23; Tuesday, May 31; Thursday, June 9
There was so much happening in early America, and yet so very few people know about it. In the last few decades, scholars have unearthed tomes of manuscripts dating back to colonial times, and what they’ve found is both fascinating and disturbing. Join us as we look at life and culture in the colonies. We’ll begin with cross-cultural encounters, particularly when the Native American Indians welcomed European explorers and Puritan settlers to what is controversially called “The New World.” We’ll then turn to all forms of dissent literature evolving from this multicultural time period: Indian captivity narratives; witchcraft trial records; slave narratives; Quakers’ travel logs; women’s manuscript diaries and commonplace books; and female seduction novels at the heart of Revolutionary America. This body of material forms the foundation of any study on American culture, thought, and identity formation.
As a online learning course, we will utilize many of the newly digitized manuscripts and primary resources from research libraries around the world.
ENGL 670-02 Writing Witness
Professor Laura Neuman
Summer Session 3: July 18- August 18, 2022
Mondays, 5:00-7:45 PM: Asynchronous – time to work on reading, writing. Tuesdays, 5:00-7:45 PM: Synchronous – meet online for live seminar. Thursdays, 5:00-7:45 PM: Synchronous – meet for group work and online for live seminar during this time.
We’ll meet for live, synchronous sessions during the time set aside on PAWS on Tuesday and Thursday evenings. Please reserve all of that time, though our Thursday evening seminars may be a bit shorter. Our class meetings will be seminar-based, and students will rotate leading discussions on the course texts.
We’ll consider fiction, non-fiction and poetry constellated around acts of witness. In what ways is contemporaneity a negotiation with the role of witness, and how might works of literature enact, complicate, perform, or document the problematics of such a position? We’ll consider the role of memory, documentation, performance, and non-human witness both living and technological. How might surveillance systems replace the human subject as central witness, in all its ethical entanglements? We’ll track our questions across multiple genres, including whodunit, auto-fiction, memoir, documentary poetics, and more, to look at the ways authors probe the concept of witness and invite the reader’s participation. Texts will likely include Don Mee Choi’s Hardly War; Viet Thanh Nguyen’s The Sympathizer; Jenny Offill’s Weather; Yōko Ogawa’s The Memory Police; Olga Tokarczuk’s Drive Your Plough Over the Fields of the Dead; Bhanu Kapil’s Ban en Banlieue; M. NourbeSe Philip’s Zong!; Allison Cobb’s Plastic: An Autobiography; Rachel Zolf’s No One’s Witness; and Emily Abendroth’s Sousveillance Pageant.