- Saint Louis University
Department of English
Adorjan Hall
3800 Lindell Blvd.
St. Louis, MO 63108
Jennifer Rust
Saint Louis University, English, Faculty Member
- Early Modern Literature, Shakespeare, Literary Theory, Critical Theory, Political Theology, English Renaissance Literature, and 31 moreSeventeenth Century English Literature, Reformation Studies, English Reformation, Elizabethan Literature, 16th Century British (Literature), Early Modern Britain, Biopolitics, Marxism, Philosophy and Religious Studies, 17th Century British (Literature), Ernst Kantorowicz, Political Economy, Early Modern Political Thought, Philosophy Of Religion, Allegory, Giorgio Agamben, Walter Benjamin, Early Modern English drama, Early Modern Intellectual History, English, Political Philosophy, Political Theory, Medieval Studies, Renaissance drama, Carl Schmitt, Shakespearean Drama, Renaissance Studies, Tudor England, Medieval Church History, Hamlet, and Reformation Historyedit
In The Body in Mystery, Jennifer R. Rust takes the political concept of the mystical body of the commonwealth, back to the corpus mysticum of the medieval church. Rust argues that the communitarian ideal of sacramental sociality had a far... more
In The Body in Mystery, Jennifer R. Rust takes the political concept of the mystical body of the commonwealth, back to the corpus mysticum of the medieval church. Rust argues that the communitarian ideal of sacramental sociality had a far longer afterlife than has been previously assumed. Reviving a critical discussion of Ernst Kantorowicz’s masterwork, The King’s Two Bodies: A Study in Mediaeval Political Theology (1957), Rust brings to bear the latest scholarship, and expands the representation of the corpus mysticum through a range of literary genres as well as religious polemics and political discourses. She reclaims the concept as an essential category of social value and historical understanding for the imaginative life of the major literature of Reformation England. The Body in Mystery provides new ways of appreciating the always rich and sometimes difficult continuities between the secular and sacred in early modern England.
Research Interests: Intellectual History, Political Philosophy, Philosophy Of Religion, Theology, Political Theory, and 54 moreLiturgy, Medieval Studies, Renaissance Studies, Religion and Politics, Shakespeare, Anthropology of the Body, Reformation History, Reformation Studies, English Reformation, Tudor England, Medieval Church History, Giorgio Agamben, Thomas Hobbes, Augustine, Early Modern Literature, Renaissance drama, History of Political Thought, Political Theology, Early Modern Britain, Early Modern Intellectual History, Apostle Paul and the Pauline Letters, History of Religion (Medieval Studies), Shakespearean Drama, John Milton, Early Modern economic and social history, Early Modern English drama, Martyrdom, Social and Political Philosophy, Revenge Tragedy, English Renaissance Literature, Elizabethan Literature, Early Modern Political Thought, 16th Century British (Literature), 17th Century British (Literature), Tudor Literature, John Foxe, Shakespearean England, Agamben, Religious Studies, Henri de Lubac, Biopolitics (in Agamben, Foucault and Negri), Tragicomedy, Reformation, Middle Ages, Titus Andronicus, Samson Agonistes, Sacramental Theology and Liturgical Studies, Martyrology, Political Philosophy, Thomas Hobbes, English Civil War, English Renaissance Drama, Medieval and Early Modern Studies, Ernst Kantorowicz, and King’s Two Bodies
Research Interests: German Studies, Political Philosophy, Political Theory, Shakespeare, Reformation Studies, and 16 moreWalter Benjamin, Renaissance drama, Political Theology, Aesthetics and Politics, Early Modern Intellectual History, Shakespearean Drama, Revenge Tragedy, Early Modern Political Thought, Carl Schmitt, Theories of Sovereignty, Tragedy (Philosophy), Hamlet, William Shakespeare, Shakespeare and Philosophy, King James I, and Trauerspiel
Discourses of health and disease pervade More's Utopia. The text insistently plays upon the ambiguities of salus, a term with a wide semantic range including spiritual salvation, the physical health of the individual body, and the wider... more
Discourses of health and disease pervade More's Utopia. The text insistently plays upon the ambiguities of salus, a term with a wide semantic range including spiritual salvation, the physical health of the individual body, and the wider welfare of the commonwealth. More's text draws on this network of metaphors of health, disease and medicine to transfigure forms of Christian pastoral government in a radical experiment in state governmentality. The Utopian hospital is a microcosm of the Utopian project, yet its prominence in the spatial structure of the ideal republic reveals tensions between individual and collective forms of care. More's text can be productively put into dialogue with Foucault's analysis of the Christian pastorate as a significant precursor to liberal governmentality and modern medical institutions. More and Foucault illuminate the long pastoral legacy of medical institutions, including the hospital as a governmental space with utopian and dystopian possibilities.
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Foucault’s genealogy of pastoral power as “a power of care” challenges us to think of modern medical institutions and practices in terms of political theology by emphasizing their continuities with older ecclesiastical practices. Both... more
Foucault’s genealogy of pastoral power as “a power of care” challenges us to think of modern medical institutions and practices in terms of political theology by emphasizing their continuities with older ecclesiastical practices. Both ecclesiastical and medical forms of pastoral power generate forms of resistance or “counter-conduct” with theological and biopolitical implications. Foucault’s prescient remarks on the relationship between forms of religious counter-conduct and modern movements to resist vaccines and other public health measures raise questions about the legacy of pastoral power in the contemporary world and the limits of rhetorical appeals to science and medical rationality.
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“Bottom’s Dream” at the end of act 4 of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream has long been recognized as an extended allusion to Saint Paul’s First Letter to the Corinthians. This passage also develops a complex version of political... more
“Bottom’s Dream” at the end of act 4 of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream has long been recognized as an extended allusion to Saint Paul’s First Letter to the Corinthians. This passage also develops a complex version of political aesthetics. In this essay, I trace how the peculiar aesthetics of Bottom’s discourse are intertwined with the theological and political concerns of the Pauline text. The aesthetics of “Bottom’s Dream” are intrinsically linked to the way that Paul’s epistle composes the mystical body, a major trope for religious and social order in premodern Europe. Paul’s text develops the incarnational and eschatological elements of the mystical body that will form the foundation for a liturgical tradition that remained resonant into the sixteenth century. Bottom’s allusive vision maintains an essential relation to the eschatological aspects of the Pauline original even as its synesthetic elements reimagine the incarnational dimensions of Paul’s text. “Bottom’s Dream” merges aesthetics with politics and theology, but this aesthetics cannot be reduced to either pure politics or theology. Ultimately, the multifaceted character of this aesthetic vision resists becoming assimilated to the instrumental politics of the Athenian elite at the end of the play.
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Research Interests: Shakespeare, Governmentality, Asceticism, English Reformation, Early Modern Literature, and 12 moreMichel Foucault, Secularization, Political Theology, Shakespearean Drama, Early Modern English drama, Shakespeare's Problem Plays, Biopower and Biopolitics, History of Christian Asceticism, Counterconduct, Governmentality Studies, Early Modern English Literature and Drama, and Michel Foucault: The subject and power
Research Interests: Shakespeare, Reformation History, English Reformation, Reformation Theology, Political Theology, and 13 moreShakespearean Drama, Early Modern English drama, Religion and Literature, English early modern Theatre, English Puritanism, Shakespeare's Problem Plays, Early modern religious history, Shakespeare Studies, Shakespearean Criticism, Shakespearean Comedy, Early Modern English Literature and Drama, Shakespearean literature, and Shakespeare and religion
This article argues that elements of Michel Foucault's genealogy of governmentality, specifically his account of premodern Christian pastoral government and resistances to it, illuminate crucial aspects of Ben Jonson's 1610 comedy The... more
This article argues that elements of Michel Foucault's genealogy of governmentality, specifically his account of premodern Christian pastoral government and resistances to it, illuminate crucial aspects of Ben Jonson's 1610 comedy The Alchemist. Pastoral government, an array of tactics that seek to direct the intrinsic qualities of persons and things toward salvific ends, is a more relevant paradigm for understanding the alchemical plot of the play than sovereignty, which is focused on the assertion of autonomous rights and external laws. The sovereign challenged in this reading is primarily the figure of the sovereign individual, the agent of capitalism and liberalism that critics often discern emerging from Jonson's play. Analyzing the play in relation to a genealogy of governmentality throws the secularity and sovereignty of the individual characters into question insofar as they are compelled to act within an alchemical scheme governed by pastoral principles.
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While John Foxe’s sixteenth century Actes and Monuments (Book of Martyrs) is recognized as a foundational document for an emergent English national identity and a key record of early Protestant subjectivity, I argue that this document of... more
While John Foxe’s sixteenth century Actes and Monuments (Book of Martyrs) is recognized as a foundational document for an emergent English national identity and a key record of early Protestant subjectivity, I argue that this document of historical progress actually recapitulates rather than discards earlier religious traditions. I demonstrate how The Book of Martyrs renovates the social and sacramental concept of the corpus mysticum, inherited from the Middle Ages, in specifically Protestant martyrological terms. Both textually and visually, Foxe’s work displaces sacramental theology from Eucharistic celebration to martyrological narrative in order to produce a reformed English corpus mysticum. To the extent that Foxe’s work pursues a political as well as theological agenda, this reading reveals how Tudor conceptions of the mystical body perpetuate a communitarian tradition formerly associated with the Catholic Mass.
Research Interests: Philosophy Of Religion, Medieval Studies, Renaissance Studies, Early Church, Reformation History, and 24 moreReformation Studies, English Reformation, Reformation Theology, Tudor England, Medieval Church History, Early Modern Literature, Political Theology, Early Modern Britain, Martyrdom, Elizabethan Literature, Early Modern Political Thought, 16th Century British (Literature), Early Modern Christian Theology, Medieval and Renaissance Studies, John Foxe, Henri de Lubac, Early modern English literature, Henry VIII, Medieval and Early Modern Literature, Martyrology, Medieval and Early Modern History, Medieval and Early Modern National Identity, Ernst Kantorowicz, and Early modern English intellectual & religious history
Research Interests: Political Philosophy, Philosophy Of Religion, Political Theory, Medieval Studies, Reformation Studies, and 12 moreMedieval Church History, Political Theology, Church History, Early Modern Intellectual History, Early Modern Political Thought, Carl Schmitt, Eucharistic Theology, Henri de Lubac, Early Modern Social History, Medieval and Early Modern History, Ernst Kantorowicz, and King’s Two Bodies
The current focus on political theology in Shakespeare studies is largely devoted to tracing how Shakespeare's dramas illuminate the structural link between religious and political forms in both early modernity and modern liberal... more
The current focus on political theology in Shakespeare studies is largely devoted to tracing how Shakespeare's dramas illuminate the structural link between religious and political forms in both early modernity and modern liberal democracy. Critics concerned with addressing Shakespeare's engagement with political theology are also interested in how Shakespeare's portrayal of sovereign bodies in crisis constitute an early representation of ‘biopolitics’. These critics draw on theorists ranging from Carl Schmitt to Giorgio Agamben to inform their analyses of the way Shakespeare dramatizes sovereignty in a ‘state of emergency’ in his histories and tragedies. Plays such as Richard II, Coriolanus, and Hamlet have drawn particular attention insofar as they vividly interrogate the nature of the sovereign exception and decision highlighted by theorists of political theology. While this line of criticism adds a new theoretical dimension to Shakespeare studies, it also offers the potential for remapping our understanding of the religious and political history of early modern England in its attention to the deforming pressure of religious schism on traditional structures of sovereignty.
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Research Interests: Reformation Studies, English Reformation, Jesuit history, Mary Queen of Scots, Early Modern Literature, and 12 moreDevotional Poetry, Catholicism in Reformation England, Allegory, Martyrdom, Elizabethan Literature, Edmund Spenser, 16th Century British (Literature), Early Modern Catholicism, Elizabethan history; English reformation, Faerie Queene, Counter-Reformation, and English Catholicism
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Research Interests: Philosophy Of Religion, Shakespeare, Reformation History, Reformation Studies, English Reformation, and 27 moreReformation Theology, Printing (Reformation Studies), Tudor England, Walter Benjamin, Melancholy, History of the Reformation, Early Modern Literature, Early Modern Intellectual History, John Calvin, Allegory, Shakespearean Drama, Early Modern English drama, Revenge Tragedy, Shakespearean England, Martin Luther, The English Reformation, Hamlet, Tragedy, Reformation, Hamlet Studies; Poetry; Interdisciplinary Studies, Protestant Reformation, Shakespere's Hamlet, Martin luther and the Reformation, Death and Suicide in Hamlet, History of the English Reformation, English social and cultural history, Trauerspiel, and The Dramatic Significance of the Ghost in Hamlet
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Dotan Leshem’s study is a valuable intervention in the larger project of developing a theological genealogy of the modern concepts of economy and government, a project inspired by Michel Foucault’s lectures on governmentality in the late... more
Dotan Leshem’s study is a valuable intervention in the larger project of developing a theological genealogy of the modern concepts of economy and government, a project inspired by Michel Foucault’s lectures on governmentality in the late 1970s and extended more recently in Giorgio Agamben’s latest contributions to the Homo Sacer series. In my remarks, I will focus mainly on Leshem’s dialogue with Foucault and Agamben, highlighting areas where I believe his work has clarified and furthered their established discourses. I will then turn to several questions that I believe are productively opened in the conclusion of Leshem’s book. These questions revolve around the mechanisms through which the theological heritage of economy mutates into the neoliberal market of the contemporary world. Leshem’s work seems ambivalent about whether this mechanism should be understood as a process of secularization or something more radical. I suggest that a deeper engagement with the Reformation moment, and particularly the classic understanding of the Reformation’s impact on the economic subject established in Max Weber’s Protestant Ethic and the “Spirit” of Capitalism, might be pursued in future work. Moreover, I suggest that a more extended engagement with Foucault’s own account of the transformation of the Christian pastorate in the wake of the Reformation and the pastorate’s implicit transformation into the regime of neoliberal governmentality could also illuminate some of the questions raised by Leshem’s study.
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Research Interests: Jurgen Habermas, Early Modern England, Religion & the Public Sphere, Medieval Drama, Civil Society and the Public Sphere, and 12 morePublic Sphere, Marxist theory, Early Modern Literature, Renaissance drama, Early Modern English drama, 16th Century British (Literature), Christopher Marlowe, Ben Jonson, English Morality Plays, Early Modern Publics and Counterpublics, Medieval and Renaissance Drama and Thought, and Publics and Counterpublics
Research Interests: Psychoanalysis, Liturgical Studies, Political Theory, Shakespeare, Renaissance drama, and 12 morePolitical Theology, Biopolitics, Early Modern English drama, Martyrdom, Early Modern Political Thought, Carl Schmitt, Theories of Sovereignty, Macbeth, Biopower and Biopolitics, Eric Santner, Ernst Kantorowicz, and King’s Two Bodies
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Jennifer R. Rust (Saint Louis University) This seminar invites papers that put Foucault’s College de France lectures of the late 1970s into dialogue with early modern literary works. How does late Foucault intersect with recent research... more
Jennifer R. Rust (Saint Louis University)
This seminar invites papers that put Foucault’s College de France lectures of the late 1970s into dialogue with early modern literary works. How does late Foucault intersect with recent research on law, political theology, biopolitics, religion? Topics might include: governmentality, pastoral power, counter-conduct, parrhesia, biopower, analytics of “race struggle,” prehistories of liberalism or neoliberalism, or assessments of Foucault’s engagement with figures such as Machiavelli or Hobbes.
Only current members of the SAA are eligible to register
for seminars and workshops for the Los Angeles
meeting ...To join or to renew your membership, visit http://www.shakespeareassociation.org/membership.
The deadline to enroll in seminars and workshops is 15 September 2017.
This seminar invites papers that put Foucault’s College de France lectures of the late 1970s into dialogue with early modern literary works. How does late Foucault intersect with recent research on law, political theology, biopolitics, religion? Topics might include: governmentality, pastoral power, counter-conduct, parrhesia, biopower, analytics of “race struggle,” prehistories of liberalism or neoliberalism, or assessments of Foucault’s engagement with figures such as Machiavelli or Hobbes.
Only current members of the SAA are eligible to register
for seminars and workshops for the Los Angeles
meeting ...To join or to renew your membership, visit http://www.shakespeareassociation.org/membership.
The deadline to enroll in seminars and workshops is 15 September 2017.
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Research Interests: Political Philosophy, Shakespeare, Governmentality, Reformation Studies, English Reformation, and 12 moreEarly Modern Literature, Michel Foucault, Renaissance drama, Political Theology, Early Modern Intellectual History, Shakespearean Drama, Early Modern English drama, Monasticism, Early Modern Political Thought, Seventeenth Century English Literature, Tragicomedy, and Governmentality Studies
Research Interests: Philosophy Of Religion, Political Theory, Governmentality, Reformation History, Reformation Studies, and 11 morePolitical History, Giorgio Agamben, History of the Reformation, Michel Foucault, Political Theology, Agamben, Biopolitics (in Agamben, Foucault and Negri), Sixteenth Century History, Governmentality and Biopower, Sixteenth Century Political Thought, and Foucault
"UPDATE: Two panels resulting from this CFP will be held at RSA 2014: "Mystical Bodies in Reformation England" (Thurs. March 27, 8:30-10:00 a.m.) AND "Crossing Confessions in Reformation England" (Thurs. March 27 10:15-11:45 am). Both... more
"UPDATE: Two panels resulting from this CFP will be held at RSA 2014: "Mystical Bodies in Reformation England" (Thurs. March 27, 8:30-10:00 a.m.) AND "Crossing Confessions in Reformation England" (Thurs. March 27 10:15-11:45 am). Both panels at Warwick Hotel New York, 2nd Floor, Warwick. See attached abstracts for more details.
"This panel invites papers that explore the idea of the mystical body during the English Reformation. We are particularly interested in papers that relate the mystical body and sacramental theology to larger cultural energies or social relations. Topics may include but are not limited to:
• the mystical body in political discourse
• the mystical body and economy
• the mystical body in early modern English drama or poetry
• rhetorics and poetics of the mystical body
• the mystical body and the body natural (early modern scientific discourses)
• gender and the mystical body
• ideas of the mystical body that span religious confessions or Medieval and Early Modern periodic divides
• the mystical body and ideas of community (sacramental, ecclesiological, political, domestic)
For consideration, please submit a brief abstract of your paper (150 words maximum) and a one-page cv to Jennifer Rust (jrust2@slu.edu) and Jay Zysk (Jay.Zysk@unh.edu) by Monday, June 3, 2013. This panel is sponsored by the Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies at Saint Louis University."
"This panel invites papers that explore the idea of the mystical body during the English Reformation. We are particularly interested in papers that relate the mystical body and sacramental theology to larger cultural energies or social relations. Topics may include but are not limited to:
• the mystical body in political discourse
• the mystical body and economy
• the mystical body in early modern English drama or poetry
• rhetorics and poetics of the mystical body
• the mystical body and the body natural (early modern scientific discourses)
• gender and the mystical body
• ideas of the mystical body that span religious confessions or Medieval and Early Modern periodic divides
• the mystical body and ideas of community (sacramental, ecclesiological, political, domestic)
For consideration, please submit a brief abstract of your paper (150 words maximum) and a one-page cv to Jennifer Rust (jrust2@slu.edu) and Jay Zysk (Jay.Zysk@unh.edu) by Monday, June 3, 2013. This panel is sponsored by the Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies at Saint Louis University."
Research Interests: Critical Theory, English Literature, Philosophy Of Religion, 17th Century & Early Modern Philosophy, Liturgical Studies, and 70 moreEarly Modern History, Renaissance Studies, Shakespeare, Medieval English Literature, Reformation History, Reformation Studies, Radical Reformation, English Reformation, Reformation Theology, Tudor England, Alchemy, Medieval and Renaissance, Early Modern Europe, Medieval Church History, History of the Reformation, Reformation and Post-Reformation, Early Modern Literature, Renaissance drama, Political Theology, Early Modern Britain, Devotional Poetry, George Herbert, Early Modern Intellectual History, Catholicism in Reformation England, Renaissance literature, Shakespearean Drama, Thomas Middleton, John Milton, John Milton, Early Modern English drama, Early Modern Science, Early Modern Rhetoric, English Renaissance Literature, Elizabethan Literature, John Donne, Early Modern Political Thought, Shakespeare's Political Thought, Edmund Spenser, Edmund Spenser, 16th Century British (Literature), 17th Century British (Literature), Alchemy (Literature), Ben Jonson, Early Modern Gender and Sexuality, Sacramental Theology, Liturgical History, Shakespearean England, Seventeenth Century English Literature, Devotional literature, The English Reformation, Jacobean theatre, Reformation, Elizabethan history; English reformation, William Shakespeare, Richard Crashaw, Queen Elizabeth I, Late medieval popular religion, heterodoxy and heresy, memory in the later Middle Ages., English Civil War, English Civil War, King James I, English Renaissance Drama, Elizabethan drama, Elizabethan England, Elizabethan and Jacobean England and Europe, Ernst Kantorowicz, James VI and I, Seventeenth Century British Poetry, Early Modern Culture, Renassiance, and Jacabean Drama
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This seminar will approach a range of Shakespearean texts through the historical and theoretical framework of political theology. In its broadest form, political theology is concerned with tracing the sources and affiliations between... more
This seminar will approach a range of Shakespearean texts through the historical and theoretical framework of political theology. In its broadest form, political theology is concerned with tracing the sources and affiliations between politics and religion, as well as their antagonisms and internal resistances, as they emerge in literary texts. In this course, we will engage with both classic and emergent areas of inquiry in the field of political theology. Political theology is most well-known for illuminating issues of sovereignty and secularization, moments of decision and states of emergency in early modern literary works. More recently, political theology has extended into questions of biopolitics, political economy and governmentality. While the classic figure of political theology may be the divinely-anointed king, political theology actually encompasses a wider cast of characters: angels and devils, nuns and friars, ministers and doctors, miscellaneous bureaucrats and other wayward souls. Throughout this course, we will explore the array of sacral metaphors and liturgical rhythms that conceptualize social and political groupings in Shakespeare's drama. We will also consider how the complex historical context of the English Reformation affects the political theology that pervades Shakespeare's works.
Research Interests: Shakespeare, English Reformation, Walter Benjamin, Giorgio Agamben, Early Modern Literature, and 14 moreMichel Foucault, Political Theology, Shakespearean Drama, Carl Schmitt, Early Modern Studies, Hamlet, Macbeth, King Lear, Coriolanus, Richard II, English Renaissance Drama, Ernst Kantorowicz, Erik Peterson, and Shakespearean Tragedy
This seminar will explore the excesses of the early modern revenge play in a variety of modes. We will reflect on how both the raw violence and cunning devices of this genre defy and deform social, political, sexual, and aesthetic... more
This seminar will explore the excesses of the early modern revenge play in a variety of modes. We will reflect on how both the raw violence and cunning devices of this genre defy and deform social, political, sexual, and aesthetic categories. Although they are usually set in the safely-removed zones of the corrupt Catholic Mediterranean, in their portraits of unruly appetites and hyperbolic violence, Elizabethan and Jacobean revenge dramas also disclose the distempers of the Reformation English body politic. By usurping the sovereign right to punish or pardon, the anti-heroes of revenge drama move outside the law; on stage, they embody revenge as " a kind of wild justice, " in Francis Bacon's famous phrase. However, the decision to revenge can also mimic the legitimate sovereign decision to suspend the law in the name of the law. The paradoxical logic of revenge finds its formal analogue in the way that the parodic and metatheatrical excesses of these plays perpetually call into question both generic and gendered norms. We will begin with the classical origins of the revenge genre in Aeschylus's Oresteia and in Seneca's Roman adaptations of this Greek tragedy. We will move on to a series of early modern revenge plays by authors including Kyd, Middleton, Webster and Ford. Although this seminar will emphasize non-Shakespearean drama, we will consider Shakespeare's two most famous contributions to the revenge genre—Titus Andronicus and Hamlet—which respond to the innovations of contemporaries and inspire imitation and parody in the work of younger playwrights. We will read some classic criticism on revenge tragedy by Fredson Bowers and T.S. Eliot, as well as influential New Historicist and cultural materialist interpretations of the genre. We will also sample some pertinent theoretical literature on revenge, law, violence and sovereignty, including
Research Interests: Walter Benjamin, Michel Foucault, Political Theology, Julia Kristeva, Revenge Tragedy, and 19 moreCarl Schmitt, John Ford, Thomas Kyd, Hamlet, Seneca's Tragedies, Titus Andronicus, Thomas Middleton, Renaissance Drama, English Renaissance Drama, Discipline and Punish, The Revenger's Tragedy, John Webster, Trauerspiel, The Abject (Kristeva), The White Devil, The Spanish Tragedy, The Duchess of Malfi, Shakespearean Tragedy, Tis Pity She's a Whore, and Hamlet or Hecuba
Throughout this course, we will be interested in how romantic, political, religious, economic, and gender conflicts are intertwined in the drama that Shakespeare wrote prior to 1600. We will begin by briefly considering Shakespeare's... more
Throughout this course, we will be interested in how romantic, political, religious, economic, and gender conflicts are intertwined in the drama that Shakespeare wrote prior to 1600. We will begin by briefly considering Shakespeare's experiments with the sonnet form, focusing particularly on the perplexing questions of sexuality raised in these poems. This inquiry will lead into a reading of our first play, the comedy Twelfth Night, which dramatically develops similar concerns with desire and sexual ambiguity. Other comedies we will read include Midsummer Night's Dream, which mingles classical myth and English folklore to create a magical alternate reality; in the course of its comic confusions, the play also explores a less ideal world of antagonism between men and women and unstable class and gender roles. We will see similar traits in the later comedy The Merchant of Venice, which adds a potentially tragic conflict between different religious groups to the comic mix. While comedy strives to escape history, Shakespeare's Roman tragedies (Titus Andronicus and Julius Caesar) use historical sources to portray the conflicts of the Roman past from a sixteenth-century perspective; in these plays, ancient Rome becomes an imaginative space for exploring more recent political and social tensions. Shakespeare's English history plays portray the historical struggles of England directly, as they draw upon chronicles of troubled medieval English kings. However, both Richard III and I Henry IV employ drama to explore precisely the gaps between appearance and reality that throw historical narratives into doubt. This course will include a few brief theoretical readings in Cultural Materialism and New Historicism (two influential scholarly approaches to Shakespeare), and students will put theory into practice in two essay assignments that place Shakespeare's work into dialogue with other cultural texts from his era. Other assignments will include presentations on film and television adaptations of famous scenes from the plays and midterm and final exams.
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Course Description This course will explore questions of faith and doubt through an array of literary works from diverse genres (poetry, drama, prose fiction and film). How does literature offer multiple perspectives on faith? How do... more
Course Description This course will explore questions of faith and doubt through an array of literary works from diverse genres (poetry, drama, prose fiction and film). How does literature offer multiple perspectives on faith? How do works of poetry and fiction represent varying experiences and expressions of faith and doubt? We will find these varying perspectives represented in high tragic drama, Southern gothic fiction and science fiction, among other forms. How do doubt and faith not only oppose, but also reinforce each other in these works? Does doubt produce a stronger faith (and vice-versa)? These questions arise in imagined situations, which range from an intimate community in rural Iowa to an urban Catholic parish to a future dystopian England. As we will find, these situations may link tensions between faith and doubt to urgent questions of social justice (such as racial equality or immigration). How does attentiveness to problems of faith and doubt challenge ordinary conduct and received views of reality? How does the literature of faith and doubt potentially critique the mainstream values of specific societies?
