Syllabi for discussion... (Corrected 9/10)

...are here:

• Section 307 (9:55 am)
• Section 315 (12:05 pm)

The syllabus for Heather's lectures is here.

(Thank you, Chelsea.)

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?

More optional reading

Surely, the first question you all want to ask is "Mike, I am eager to do extra, optional reading -- what books might I pick up?" Well, my friend, here are a couple ideas: I just picked up Stephen Greenblatt's Will in the World, his recent biographical consideration of Shakespeare -- it's a delightful read by a fairly well-reputed American scholar of Shakespeare. Along similar lines is James Shapiro's (no relation) A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare, or so I have been told.

Office hours

Every Tuesday from 3:30 to 5:30 pm, I will be in the Fair Trade Coffee House at 418 State Street. If your schedule allows, you might think about visiting me there sometime in the first few weeks of the semester -- you don't have to, but it will give us a chance to get to know each other, and to chat about Shakes.

Shakespearean supplements

There are rather a lot of supplemental materials out there purporting to explain Shakespeare to beginning readers -- doubtlessly, Cliff, Spark and Monarch make a tidy profit every fall as students wade through another semester's densely-packed syllabus. These guides have their place as memory aids, but Heather's own study guides (linked on the right) do this work just as well, and for free. The real danger of Cliff and Spark is that their readings are flat and finite.

Good supplemental texts help you see how the uncertainties of Shakespeare explode off the page, and they give you the tools you need not to "understand" a text -- as though understanding that could be achieved for you via a $6, 96-page pamphlet -- but to read it, and read it well.

When I took my first introductory collegiate Shakespeare course, I found a few supplemental resources especially useful:

• The Meaning of Shakespeare (1951), by Harold C. Goddard. (In two volumes.) Goddard writes lengthy, reflective considerations of Shakespeare's plays and only rarely offers a conclusive interpretation; he generally prefers to roll the plays around his mind until he has found just enough new ways of thinking about them, and then he moves along.
• Northrop Frye on Shakespeare (1986), by Northrop Frye. (Of our texts this semester his book covers only MSND and The Tempest.) Frye was a gifted critic, and these short essays on Shakespeare are excellent introductions to the analytical tools critics bring to Shakespeare's plays.
• Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human (1998), by Harold Bloom. Bloom is generally considered a popular critic rather than an academic one. This is good in that he writes specifically for readers who are coming to Shakespeare as nonexperts; this is bad in that he occasionally oversimplifies Shakespeare. Read any supplemental guide to Shakespeare skeptically, but read Bloom's guide with an extra dose of skepticism.

Class calendar

If you would find it useful to have an updated online version of the English 162 calendar for the semester, please feel free to use this one:

(If you have your own Google calendar, you can add this one as a layer in yours.)

An exceedingly short note about email

You should email me, without hesitation, whenever you have a question you think I might be able to help you answer.

My preferred email address is mashapiro@gmail.com. Please note the second letter: in the past, students have left it out, sending email off into the unanswering void. Think of it thus: MA is a TA.

(That "A" stands for "Alan," the name of my hypochondriac great-grandfather. According to family legend, he always used a handkerchief to open doors, and he chewed every bite of food thirty-two times.)