Got Lear?

We're at the end of the semester, which means that I have to submit my book orders for the fall.  (It...never ends, does it?)  I'm back to teaching intro to lit analysis, which falls into two halves: poetry and then a long Shakespeare unit, the latter  of which involves one Shakespeare play and several adaptations/appropriations thereof.  This half of the class strongly emphasizes authors responding to Shakespeare in wildly different historical and cultural contexts, so that we can get a sense of how a work "travels."  The past couple of rounds have been all Hamlet, all the time, but I've decided to resuscitate my previous standby, King Lear--albeit with mostly new works.  I generally show at least one film, but the shift to fifty-minute class sessions means that I have to recalculate the amount of time I need. 

Ergo:

• Source material from Monmouth and Holinshed
• King Lear
• Possibly some excerpts from Nahum Tate
• (I don't know if I have time to show an entire King Lear, although I frequently show large chunks of the Holm version; perhaps I'll switch to the newer McKellen staging this time)
• Honore de Balzac, Pere Goriot (knocking out Jane Smiley's A Thousand Acres; I was also thinking about doing Zola's La Terre)
• Jacob Gordin, The Jewish King Lear Comes to America (because it's a comedy, among other things)
• Akira Kurosawa, Ran (which students  either really love or really loathe; we'll see how the coin toss goes)

 

 

Comments

[PRT]

Another option for a comedy, though perhaps not as good (I haven't read Gordin, so thanks for letting me know about it) is Christopher Moore's novel Fool.

[anthony]

no women?

[Miriam]

Anthony: The KL revisions by women I wanted to assign were all OOP, which wasn't helpful, and A Thousand Acres wears less well for me each time I teach it. (OTOH, there are a lot of women in the first half of the semester.) That being said, the final paper is about works not on the syllabus, so...

[anthony]

It must be difficult, i was curious about the structure of choice, and not trying to give you shit.