Humanities Arts Cultural Stu 0288 - Shakespeare and Woolf

"Lovers and madmen have such seething brains/ Such shaping phantasies, that apprehend/ More than cool reason ever comprehends." (A Midsummer Night's Dream) In this class we will set in dialogue texts of Shakespeare (five plays) and Virginia Woolf (four novels and selected essays). Our main focus will be on the texts, reading them with close attention to language and form as well as to their widely different literary and cultural assumptions. However, one thread tying together our work on these two authors will be their common interest in the ways human beings lose their frames of reference and their sense of themselves in madness, lose and find themselves in love or in sexuality, and find or make both self and world in the shaping act of the imagination. The method of the course will include directed close reading, discussion, and periodic lectures. Frequent short pieces of student writing are expected, together with two short essays and a developed longer paper

Writing and Research Students are expected to spend 12 hours weekly in preparation and work outside of class time.