As I read through our selection of sonnets, two basic questions emerge as central to our critical task. They are as follows:
(1) What does the poetic treatment of love and desire in the 16th/17th
century have to tell us about conceptions of selfhood in that period?
(2) In what ways does Shakespeare interrogate or struggle with those conceptions of selfhood?
The first question is methodological and theoretical. It has to do with poetry's status as intellectual-historical evidence. What can this kind of source tell us about selfhood that other sources can't? The second question has to do with an individual writer's craft. To get a better sense of this, you may (if you have time) choose to look at some other sonnets written by other English Renaissance poets for comparison. A couple useful ones are Edmund Spenser's sonnet 75 (from the Amoretti, 1594) and Philip Sidney's sonnet 1 (from Astrohpil and Stella, 1591).
Monday, September 21, 2015
Wednesday, September 16, 2015
Monday, September 14, 2015
Historical Contexts: What is a Self?
Top to bottom: image from René Descartes, Discourse on Method, Optics, Geometry, and Meteorology (Leiden, 1637); frontispiece to Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan (London, 1651), detail from Leviathan frontispiece; frontispiece and two images from Andreas Vesalius, De Humani Corporis Fabrica (Basel, 1543).
Welcome!
Welcome, everyone, to "Shakespeare and Selfhood," an M.A. seminar at the University of Lausanne. I look forward to working with you over the next several months. Below is a basic course description. (You can download a full prospectus and class schedule from Moodle.) This blog will be used to post discussion questions, assignment information, and other resources, so please bookmark it and check it regularly. Thanks!
Shakespeare and Selfhood
Shakespeare and Selfhood
Autumn 2015
Anthropole 4129
Tuesday, 10:15-11:45
Prof. Kevin
Curran
Office: Anth
5123
Consultation:
Tuesdays, 1:00-3:00 PM
Email:
kevin.curran@unil.ch
Description
What is a self? Are we minds that just happen to
perceive a body and physical surroundings, or are we bodies whose sensory
experience of material reality creates something that feels like an independent
mental world? Are we free agents, or are our actions determined by our
environment? And if we can figure out who we are, does that make it easier to
know how we should live? For example, is there a certain system of governance
(monarchy, democracy, socialism) that is more in sync with human nature than
others? There have been many attempts to answer these questions in philosophy,
politics, science, law, and religion. The premise of this course, a premise
shared by many readers and theatergoers from the eighteenth century onwards, is
that Shakespeare, too, has something to tell us about selfhood. Focusing on a
selection of plays, this course will explore the relationship between
Shakespearean drama and the idea of selfhood from two perspectives: (1)
Historical: Shakespeare wrote his plays during what is typically taken to be a
watershed period in the history of selfhood, a period during which some have
argued the modern self—closed, autonomous, interiorized, uniquely
individual—begins to emerge. (2) Theatrical: the social and material contexts
in which Shakespeare’s plays were performed and the gestural and rhetorical
practices used to form character on stage contribute to specific ways of
understanding the self.
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