Shakespeare’s Tempest: Laying Claim to the Canon
This course was available in the past and may be presented again as part of the Open Enrollment curriculum.
It might be defined as the set of rules, principles, or standards that organize a field of study or an art. Or, The Canon might refer to all of the books or artworks that are generally understood to be “great”, such as the Mona Lisa, the symphonies of Beethoven, or the novels of Charles Dickens. Who makes these rules? And who determines which artists and works are canonical? What kind of power or pressure does the canon exert over artists and writers? How can the canon be used to exclude or punish writers or artists who challenge the rules, or who don’t conform to our ideas about who and what is “great”? In this course we will think about these kinds of questions first by studying The Tempest, a play by the super-canonical figure, William Shakespeare. We will then focus on a film (Julie Taymor’s Tempest) and a play (Aimé Césaire’s A Tempest) that both adapt and contest Shakespeare’s original, especially with respect to gender and race.