Overview

Description

CALENDAR DESCRIPTION:

Examines selected works of Shakespeare, organized by critical issues or theoretical approaches.

COURSE DETAILS:

Difficult to define, affect straddles multiple binaries—inner and outer, mind and body, active and passive, sentient and unconscious, individual and collective. Whether conceptualized as feelings, moods, and emotions (what might be called the internal experience of affect), or as demeanor or manner (that is, the bodily manifestation or performance of affective states), whether thought of in relation to sense and the body or as an element of cognition, affect studies has become a vital part of literary inquiry, even while theorizations of affect remain diverse and capacious. For the past 30-40 years early modern literary studies has been dominated by historicist approaches, and while examining the ineffable place of feeling in aesthetic encounters might be seen as a turn away from the historical, I’d like us in our studies to imagine how we might treat history and affect as mutually reinforcing theoretical or philosophical contexts. For the first several weeks of this course, we will read a range of affect theorists, some of whom approach affect studies specifically from an early modern English perspective and some who do not. We will then move onto read five to seven plays by Shakespeare, alongside of critical analyses that read the plays through the variable lenses of affect.  Theoretical and critical readings will include writings by some or all of the following: Sara Ahmed, Sabina Amanbayeva, Teresa Brennan, Lynne Bruckner, Drew Daniel, Mario DiGangi, Melinda Kingsbury, James A Knapp, Sianne Ngai, Gail Kern Pastor, Eve Sedgewick, Laurie Shannon, Jennifer Vaught, Paul Joseph Zajac, Melissa Gregg and Gregory J. Seigworth .

Grading

Materials

REQUIRED READING: