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A foolish old king, one good and two evil daughters, heartless cruelty, a bastard brother, someone pretending to be a mad beggar, rage, poisoning and suicide and the excitement: King Lear has it all. This course will give you an opportunity to engage in a close reading of this play. We shall consider historical and cultural contexts as well as questions relating to the staging of the play, both in Shakespeare’s time and today. We shall also look at cinematic and other adaptations and works of art inspired by this tragedy.
Please buy this edition and none other: William Shakespeare (ed.: R.A. Foakes), King Lear. The Arden Shakespeare, Third Series. (Bloomsbury), ISBN 978-0174434603. You will need this book from the first week of the seminar, so buy it as soon as possible and start reading. Do not waste your money on other editions without substantial annotations as these would be useless for the purposes of this course.
Requirements: Thorough preparation for each session, active participation, including quite a bit of shouting and howlhowlhowlhowling plus doing any amount of wild, exciting and outrageous things. (Yes, I am afraid all of this will have to be done online – but we are going to have a go at it anyway. You will get a chance to turn into a king, a bastard or an evil daughter, and your Zoom window will be your stage.) Also anything that might be required according to yor Modulhandbuch / Studienordnung. As always: think, enjoy (!), annotate, and look things up if necessary.
The seminar will be conducted entirely online and entirely in real time. We will meet via Zoom, each week of the semester at the time of the seminar. Please join the seminar´s Moodle room (“Howl, howl, howl, howl! William Shakespeare, King Lear; password: LearWS20-21); you will receive further information via Moodle. Please make sure to use and check your official university e-mail addresses at all times. Do not use any other addresses, and do not have e-mails sent to your university address forwarded to other addresses. Our experience in the last semester has shown that using non-university addresses / forwarding mails will lead to our messages bouncing back in very many cases.
Just in case your application is rejected by the LSF system: If you want to do this course because you are genuinely interested, you will be most welcome, no matter what LSF says. Please get in touch with claudia.hausmann@uni-due.de who will enrol you manually. The worst that might happen to you is that you cannot do a Leistungsnachweis if you lack the formal requirements. |
