Description
This course provides the opportunity to study William Shakespeare's plays in the Renaissance context while also exploring how non-Western peoples (countries like Mexico, South Africa, and Japan, as well as Native American cultures) have incorporated and negotiated Shakespeare's works into their own modern approaches. The class will discuss the cultural, political, racial, gendered conflicts that dominate the Shakespearean conversation. In addition, this course will expose students to the nature of the English language and its literature along with the role these elements have played in colonialism. While many argue that it is Shakespeare's universalism that allows his plays to endure, this class will also examine the question of the endurance of Shakepeare's plays, pondering whether it is their universalism or the colonization of indigenous cultures, supplanting them with a modern "Western" culture. Equipped with a variety of critical/theoretical practices, students will be asked to ne