ENGL 552 Seminar in Drama: Hamlet Reincarnated
Dr. Lincoln Konkle
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 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.
ENGL 670 The Witch in Literature in Cornwall/Scotland
Dr. Michele Tarter
Study Abroad Course June 26-July 13
Come to Cornwall and Scotland to study the history and literature of Witches! This 4-credit hour course will begin in London, where we will see a Shakespearean play at the Globe Theatre, take a boat ride along the River Thames, and visit Universal Studios’ Harry Potter Tour!
Then launch with us to Scotland, where we will visit sites of witchcraft and local lore in not only Edinburgh (the place where the Harry Potter series was born) but also in the Highlands-ranging from magical Fairy Glens to Macbeth’s Cawdor Castle, a boat ride in search of the Loch Ness Monster, and an adventure to the Isle of Lewis’ Callanish Standing Stones Stay in Tintagel, by the Cornish Sea, where we will visit the world-renowned Museum of Witchcraft and Magic, visit Merlin’s Cave and King Arthur’s castle ruins, in addition to mystical holy wells and waterfalls.
Our last stop will be at Glastonbury’s magical Tor and Holy Chalice Well, along with a walk around Stonehenge. There are so many magical places to visit, so much history to learn, and so much literature about witches to analyze. Come join us!
For more Information check out the Center for Global Engagement’s website at: https://studyabroad.tcnj.edu/index.cfm?FuseAction=Programs.ViewProgramAngular&id=44301
Information sessions on Zoom- Monday, October 18th and Wednesday, November 3rd