Reading & Composition

“My words fly up, my thoughts remain below; words without thoughts never to heaven go.”

-William Shakespeare, Hamlet (Spoken by Claudius, III, iii, 100-103)

In this course, we will spend time reading plays, novels, and poems that either constitute or contain one (or both) of two speech acts: the curse and the supplication. We will think about the recurring trope of invoking “the gods” or “a higher power,” which runs through literary traditions from antiquity to modernity. We will consider the particular aesthetic qualities of tragedy, incantation, and benediction.

As we will see, the lines between blessing and curse, malediction and prayer are not always as definite as we’d imagine, and this will provoke us to think about the consequences of answered prayer. In addition, we will want to think about why it is that the most abandoned, abject, and helpless literary figures are the most frequent to have recourse to discourses of invocation. To whom do they call out for help, and why? Who gets to pray to whom, and what counts as legitimate prayer? Finally, the works we encounter will prompt us to re-examine our definitions of the “sacred” and “profane,” particularly as those concepts relate to literary texts.

This is a writing-intensive course, and we will explore all of these questions as a means of refining writing skills. Students will write and re-write a number of essays, and writing “workshops” will occur on a weekly basis. The final portion of the course will be spent on developing research skills, and will culminate in a research paper on one of the texts we have studied.

Required Texts:

William Shakespeare, Macbeth

Euripides, The Trojan Women

Maryse Condé, I, Tituba, Black Witch of Salem

James Baldwin, Go Tell It on the Mountain

Tony Kushner, Angels in America, Part 1: Millennium Approaches