ENGL 200 H: Reading Literary Forms

Re-visioning English Literary Classics

In this course, we will read two canonical English literary works, Shakespeare’s Othello and The Tempest, and examine the transformations they have undergone through revisions by authors from different historical, geographic and cultural locations.  In the process, we will address the global permutations of English literary works, why and how Shakespeare's two plays have been revised, and the relationship between the works and their revisions. Our goal in the course will be to open up Shakespeare’s plays in all their textual complexity and to think through practices of re-visioning. The main questions shaping our discussions will be: what does the process of re-visioning tell us about the work being appropriated? What does it tell about who does the re-visioning? What pressures does the process of re-visioning exert on the English literary canon? Why have Shakespeare’s plays retained such a dominant trans-national presence so many centuries after their composition?

Required texts: William Shakespeare, Othello (1603)and The Tempest (1610-11); Aime Cesaire, A Tempest (1969); Gloria Naylor, Mama Day, (1966); Tayib Salih, Season of Migration to the North (1978) and Paula Vogel, Desdemona: A Story about a Handkerchief (1994).