Social Dreaming and Making Shakespeare Matter

College Literature, 2004

New Theories, Models and Methods in Literary and Cultural Studies

SEMINAR # 1: Shakespeare on Film: Theory and Practice ///// Shakespeare has been screened—projected on the silver screen and filtered by various ideologies—since 1899. We will examine the adaptation of Shakespeare as a historical and colonial practice and conclude with contemporary case studies. Theories covered include postcolonial criticism, disability studies, cultural materialism, gender theories, critical race studies, film and auteur theories, and performance theories. //// SEMINAR # 2: Global Shakespeare //// What is the secret of Shakespeare’s wide appeal? Has Shakespeare always been a cultural hero? The course considers how ideologies about race, gender, and class shape Shakespeare’s plays and how world cultures shape the plays’ afterlives. The course introduces students to the English-subtitled theater works and films of directors from Kuwait, France, South Africa, Japan, Germany, Singapore, China, New Zealand, Brazil, the U.K., and U.S. All videos have English subtitles.

2020

This comparative and interdisciplinary study of the historical spread of Shakespeare among non-Anglophone nations in Europe and India sheds important new light on individual novelistic, operatic, and dramatic adaptations, while at the same time both theorising a major revision to postcolonial thinking and offering a new vision for Shakespeare studies. Sen's concept of 'performative transculturation' allows for a welcome and more encompassing vision of artistic innovation over time and across cultures. He complicates simple binaries, especially of European/Indian acceptance or rejection of Western culture/ Shakespeare, revealing instead the rich middle ground in between these extremes of reception. In the process, Sen's innovative 'relational' approach to reading cross-cultural adaptations also makes a major contribution to adaptation theory.

Notes and Queries, 2002

The two terms of this book's title-'culture' and 'myth'-map the territory of its contents, which span more or less a decade of work (1984-94) in a particular area of Shakespeare studies. The subtitle derives from a collection of essays by various hands, published in 1988 as The Shakespeare Myth. The term 'myth' was derived from Roland Barthes' Mythologies i was an attempt to identify a powerful cultural institution, constructed around the figure of Shakespeare, that could be analysed to some degree separately from the person of the Elizabethan dramatist, and the texts of his works. Traditional Shakespeare criticism, as it is still very widely practised, consists of reading and interpreting the plays and poems; seeking to unlock their intrinsic meanings by reference to the author's assumed 'intentions' or to the historical context in which he wrote; analysing the plays in relation to their origins in the Elizabethan theatre and so on. The Shakespeare Myth sought a different approach:

This is a chapter from my PhD thesis 'Possible Shakespeares: The educational value of working with Shakespeare through theatre-based practice' (available: http://wrap.warwick.ac.uk) and is an update on the previous history written for the RSC. this chapter contextualise the current debate around the value of Shakespeare in our education systems by reviewing the growth of English literature as a subject for study and how Shakespeare found his place as its only compulsory author. I explore how the plays came to be regarded primarily as literary heritage conveying 'universal' values, and how current policy seems to have conflated those 'universal' values with 'British' values.

Marxists Shakespeares, 2001

Why is Marxism is dismissed as mere “ideology” by proponents of a “universal Shakespeare,” who by contrast present the Bard as free, autonomous, unfettered by ideology? These two opposed positions have a complex relationship to what Bataille called the “restricted economy” of scarcity and the “general economy” of surplus and plenitude. The idea of a universal aesthetic was constructed in the early modern period as the domain of a spurious general economy of plenitude that was always in service of the restricted economies of market capitalism. Thus, today, universalizing critics such as Harold Bloom perversely construe Shakespeare as “broad” and theory as “narrow.” By contrast, Shershow argues for a model of what Jean-Luc Nancy, building on Bataille, calls “literary communism.” “Shakespeare” re-emerges, not as the heroic, autonomous, universal poet – whose words vibrate in tune with the heroic literary interpreter but instead as what Nancy calls a “singular voice in common.”

This paper considers the place of Shakespeare in the policy, speeches and press releases of the Coalition government, ahead of the release of the National Curriculum for English for secondary school level. It posits a contradiction between the pro-Shakespeare, cultural conservatism of key figures in the Department of Education with the diversification of the school system which could lead to the requirements for all students to study Shakespeare being disapplied, and thus, the end of 'Shakespeare for all' in reality if not rhetoric.

2005

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