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Love, thirst for revenge, accusations of witchcraft, burning jealousy, quite a bit of fighting and, of course, lots of sighing and shouting: Othello has it all. This course will give you an opportunity to immerse yourselves in a close reading of this play, combined with a great deal of hands-on acting. We shall consider historical and cultural contexts as well as questions relating to the staging of the play, both in Shakespeare’s time and today. We shall also look at cinematic and other adaptations and works of art inspired by this play.
Please buy this edition and none other: William Shakespeare (ed.: E.A.J. Honigmann, with a new preface by Ayanna Thompson), Othello. The Arden Shakespeare, Third Series. (Bloomsbury). ISBN 978-1472571762. Do not waste your money on texts without substantial annotations or any version of Othello you may happen to find on the internet as these would be useless for the purposes of this course. You will need the text (in the shape of the actual book) from the first week of the seminar, so buy your book as soon as possible and start reading. Useful background knowledge on key cultural and literary contexts of Shakespeare’s time can be found here: Christoph Heyl, Kleine Englische Literaturgeschichte. J.B. Metzler. ISBN-13: 978-3476045096.
Requirements: Good preparation for each session, active participation, including quite a bit of sighing and shouting plus doing all sorts of of wild, exciting and outrageous things. You will get a chance to turn into a Venetian beauty, a military commander from North Africa, a rather funny servant, or a delightfully evil traitor. As always: read, think, enjoy (!), annotate, and look things up if necessary. Also: written work or oral exam according to your particular Studienordnung.
Just in case your application is rejected by the LSF system: If you want to do this course because you are genuinely interested, you will be most welcome, no matter what LSF says. Please get in touch with aj.naujoks-sprengel@uni-due.de who will enrol you manually. The worst that might happen to you is that you cannot do a Leistungsnachweis if you lack the formal requirements. |
