Pop Culture Shakespeare
Class Information
Instructor: Bloom, Gina
CRN: 44581
Time: TR 9:00-10:20am
Location: Walker 1330
GE Areas: Domestic Diversity Writing Experience Visual
Description
The theater stage has always been a popular medium for Shakespeare?s plays, and the plays have also been adapted for other media, especially film and video. Today, Shakespearean drama is transposed to just about every media form imaginable, and this great range of popular culture adaptations is the focus of our course. We?ll explore how Shakespeare?s plays are rendered on screen (via television, social media, and videogames) and off-screen (comic books, music, and board/role-playing games). How does adapting Shakespeare for popular audiences and different media forms affect the meaning of Shakespeare?s plays? How can Shakespeare help us think anew about popular media that we use every day? How does transposing the plays to these popular media enable the plays to address wider, more diverse audiences, and to speak to human differences such as gender, race, ethnicity, sexuality, religion, and social class? How can adaptations of plays performed 400 years ago in England help us think about issues important to us here and now?
This course fulfills the GEs in Visual Literacy and Domestic Diversity.
Texts
Romeo and Juliet, Shakespeare
Hamlet, Shakespeare
Midsummer Night's Dream, Shakespeare
Elsinore, Golden Glitch Studios
To be or not to be: A Chooseable Path Adventure, Ryan North
Prince of Cats, Ronald Wimberly
And more