ENL 5246 Fall 2018 Pascoe

Class members will consider the stage as an echo chamber of previous performances, and the nineteenth-century novel as a stage for ghosts of the theatrical past. How do Shakespeare's plays (most notably The Winter's Tale) get reinvented by the Romantics, and how do celebrity actors become irrevocably bound to particular roles? We will consider the afterlives of star performances as they are evoked by later novels and plays (such as Charlotte Brontë's Villette, Henry James's The Aspern Papers, and Ronald Harwood's After the Lions). We will also explore how the advent of recording technology altered cultural imaginings of the theatrical past. Our discussions will be supported by readings in theatre history and criticism (especially the work of Marvin Carlson and Joseph Roach), as well as by histories and theories of the voice and its technological reproduction (including the writings of Wayne Koestenbaum, Roland Barthes, and Mladen Dolar).

This class asks students to develop a daily writing discipline in order to use writing as a form of active and creative thinking (and also to avoid end-of-semester binge writing). Imagine an interpretive continuum looking something like this:

Reading Notes . . . Trial Interpretations . . . Seminar Paper

Although the number of pages students generate at each stage of the continuum is flexible, the obligation to write-early on in the semester and consistently across the semester-is not. The point of all this writing will be to build the groundwork for a substantial portfolio of critical prose-cogent, polished, engaging work.

Students have the option of experimenting with new research methodologies and publishing platforms, and will be able to draw on technological support for more experimental endeavors. Students from all disciplinary fields are welcome.