As a work that survives and appears in more than one form, King Lear has a vexing problem of interpretation and a rich opportunity for the study of textual and cultural variants. The play begins with an aging monarch staging a fantastical, paradoxical final act as a king. It lures us toward a final act of interpretation to nail down the nature of…[Read more]

As a work that survives and appears in more than one form, King Lear has a vexing problem of interpretation and a rich opportunity for the study of textual and cultural variants. The play begins with an aging monarch staging a fantastical, paradoxical final act as a king. It lures us toward a final act of interpretation to nail down the nature of…[Read more]

In As You Like It, Shakespeare glorifies the social bandits that survive in the Forest of Arden, likening them to Robin Hood outlaws. Near-contemporary pseudo-biographies also record Shakespeare’s early life as a poacher and youthful renegade. Shakespeare’s play might suggest his advocacy of food sovereignty and social justice, a romanticized ima…[Read more]

Moon-Crossed reimagines the central plot of Shakespeare’s All’s Well That Ends Well as a means to examining the female monstrous in early modern drama, literature, and though. Why doesn’t Bertram like Helena? Because she’s a werewolf. But as he learns, she’s of a very noble line of werewolves. She saves the King of France, he learns a bit more…[Read more]

This section of 494 provides students with an introduction to the reading, history, and making of comics and graphic novels. Comics have often been associated with popular culture, pulp fiction, and ephemerality. Yet comics merge image and text to create a unique form of sequential art that is becoming ever more visible and influential in our…[Read more]

DTC 356 explores the cultural, aesthetic, and political roles of information and data. Beginning with library classification systems and Wikipedia, the course then turns to the role of metadata in organizing collections and our lives before ending with a consideration of text-mining and topic modeling. The conclusion considers these techniques in…[Read more]

This essay examines the Hindi Nayī Kahānī, or New Story, Movement of the 1950s and 1960s, which was influential for the short stories, criticism, and literary history that its writers produced. Incorporating a view toward the larger “metaliterary” corpus in relation to which properly “literary” nayī kahānī texts were written, the essay shows h…[Read more]

This multilingual undergraduate translation workshop was co-taught in the Spring of 2014 with Prof. Norman Holland in the division of Humanities, Arts, and Cultural Studies at Hampshire College. During the course, students were introduced to translation theory and explored key concepts through intralingual translation exercises before embarking on…[Read more]

Attenuated Shakespearean references in popular cultural texts communicate meaning only because audiences, storytellers, and lovers all over the world identify the scene in Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet instantly as an emblem of romantic love. The Two Gentlemen of Verona, The Merchant of Venice, and Antony and Cleopatra likewise include scenes i…[Read more]

Attenuated Shakespearean references in popular cultural texts communicate meaning only because audiences, storytellers, and lovers all over the world identify the scene in Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet instantly as an emblem of romantic love. The Two Gentlemen of Verona, The Merchant of Venice, and Antony and Cleopatra likewise include scenes i…[Read more]

Screened performances screen out the qualities of ‘liveness’ – immediacy, unpredictability, ephemerality, spatial proximity, danger – to varying degrees according to their media, contexts, and audiences. As Philip Auslander has argued, ‘liveness’ itself is intermedial; in order to characterize a performance as ‘live,’ we contrast it to a ‘mediat…[Read more]

Screened performances screen out the qualities of ‘liveness’ – immediacy, unpredictability, ephemerality, spatial proximity, danger – to varying degrees according to their media, contexts, and audiences. As Philip Auslander has argued, ‘liveness’ itself is intermedial; in order to characterize a performance as ‘live,’ we contrast it to a ‘mediat…[Read more]

“Focus on ‘Henry V'” is a peer-reviewed, multimedia, digital Open Educational Resource co-authored and co-produced by faculty, graduate students, and undergraduates on the innovative digital publishing platform Scalar. Chapters include guides to early printed editions, sources, and performance and cinematic histories of the play, as well as…[Read more]

“Focus on ‘Henry V'” is a peer-reviewed, multimedia, digital Open Educational Resource co-authored and co-produced by faculty, graduate students, and undergraduates on the innovative digital publishing platform Scalar. Chapters include guides to early printed editions, sources, and performance and cinematic histories of the play, as well as…[Read more]

“Focus on ‘Henry V'” is a peer-reviewed, multimedia, digital Open Educational Resource co-authored and co-produced by faculty, graduate students, and undergraduates on the innovative digital publishing platform Scalar. Chapters include guides to early printed editions, sources, and performance and cinematic histories of the play, as well as…[Read more]

“Focus on ‘Henry V'” is a peer-reviewed, multimedia, digital Open Educational Resource co-authored and co-produced by faculty, graduate students, and undergraduates on the innovative digital publishing platform Scalar. Chapters include guides to early printed editions, sources, and performance and cinematic histories of the play, as well as…[Read more]

This essay considers the use that twenty-first-century fictionalized cancer narratives make of Shakespeare’s words, the Shakespeare industry, and editorial and textual apparatuses to trope the ambiguous status of the post-millennial cancer patient. In the so-called “women’s novel” The Weird Sisters by Eleanor Brown, the genre thriller What Time De…[Read more]

This essay considers the use that twenty-first-century fictionalized cancer narratives make of Shakespeare’s words, the Shakespeare industry, and editorial and textual apparatuses to trope the ambiguous status of the post-millennial cancer patient. In the so-called “women’s novel” The Weird Sisters by Eleanor Brown, the genre thriller What Time De…[Read more]