This class acknowledges the critical importance of Shakespeare's works as cultural documents. By examining a selection of his dramatic works in the context of literary, cinematic, and graphic novel adaptations, we'll see that these plays have had a profound influence on other writers and artists over the centuries.

Comics, films, and literature have all been inspired by Shakespeare's dramatic works. In this class we will explore these inspirations, as well as the originals from which they are created. We'll analyze four Shakespeare plays--The Taming of the Shrew; Othello; Macbeth; and The Tempest--as a work in and of itself, looking at the ways in which Shakespeare has handled characterization, dramatic plotting, language, and a series of other literary techniques. We'll then move on to an analysis of films, comic books, and literary adaptations of these Shakespearean dramas. They'll be either clear "rewritings" of the plays, showing strong adherence to the original, or they'll be quite free versions of the plays, showing some echoes or inspirations from Shakespeare, but demonstrating their authors' own visions of characterization, plot, and theme. By the end of the semester, we should have a heightened appreciation not only for the original Shakespeare plays, but also for the ways in which filmmakers, comic book artists and other playwrights have harnessed Shakespeare's vision and made it their own.

Course fulfills pre-1800 requirement for English, English Teaching, and LS majors. It is Writing Intensive.

Literary Genrelessness: Writers dealing with the absurd, unexplainable, existential, and the unknown. Inspired by Giovanni Boccaccio’s plague stories gathered in “The Decameron,” the New York Times asked twenty-nine fiction writers to write about pandemic life for their Decameron Project. When reality is surreal, they surmised, only fiction can make sense of it. Making sense of reality is what storytellers have been doing since long before the written word, and in this class, we’ll read and discuss a wide variety of contemporary writers who do just that: N.K. Jemisin, Mohsin Hamid, Carmen Maria Machado, Shruti Swamy, Jennifer Egan, John Edgar Wideman, Clarice Lispector, Italo Calvino, Lydia Davis, and more. As writers, we’ll discuss issues of craft, intention, ambition, and perhaps most importantly, practical application of the skills gleaned from careful reading of authors who ignore genre in their quest to wrest sense from the senseless. We’ll leave no stone unturned as we ask not what it all means, but how it all works. How do these writers visualize, create, populate, and realize their stories? How do their choices both utilize and surmount realism? How do they access what John Gardner called the “vivid and continuous dream” of fiction? Since this class is about writers and for writers, we’ll read like writers, devotees to the lucid application of language in service of good art. We’ll also join these writers on the page, writing and presenting work that follows Jill Alexander Essbaum’s adage: “Obey no rule that impedes good art.”