Discussion questions (week 1)

Every week, before discussion on Friday, I will post one or two discussion questions right here. Usually I will post these questions after Heather's second lecture of the week.

Posted below are the two questions I want to focus on in our discussion on Friday. Please take half an hour to think them over -- you might even want to jot down some possible answers, so that you have ideas to begin with in Friday's discussion.

1. Think about the economics of English 162 for a minute. The University of Wisconsin - Madison is paying Heather's salary -- which I hope is quite a lot -- and mine, and that of the other five TAs for the class; it is paying to keep Humanities 3650 clean, cool, and in working order; and it is making some three hundred students -- many of whom just want to get degrees in kinesthesiology and get out of here -- take this class to fulfill a gen. ed. requirement, thereby slowing down students' academic careers and delaying the date at which they can begin donating lots and lots of money to their alma mater. Then multiply this class by the 26 University of Wisconsin campuses.

   Don't get me wrong: I love that the University is paying so much money to make sure that no student gets a Wisconsin degree without spending three months working through the interpretive knots of English literature, but I have to wonder: Why does the University find studying Shakespeare so enormously valuable? Why is it worth the expenditure it receives?

2. Think about the Toolbox question Heather gave us this afternoon: How does the context in which a text is encountered inform our understanding its meaning? Apply this question to the way we are encountering Shakespeare's plays: How does the fact that we are encountering MSND as written words rather than as a theatrical performance shape our understanding of the meaning of the play? You can be even more detailed about this: how is the way we read MSND different when we encounter it in a 5.6-pound book with Shakespeare's 36 other plays sitting around it, with copious scholarly annotation at the bottom of every page? What would it be like to, instead, encounter the play in the 0.15-pound Dover edition, which is completely without annotation?

3. In lecture this week, Heather has given several examples of how the staging of a scene can substantially alter its meaning or, at least, its mood. Pick a few lines from Act I or Act II of MSND (not ones that Heather has discussed, though). If you were directing the play, how could you stage those lines two completely different ways: once comically and once tragically; or, in Heather's words, once dreamily and once nightmarishly?