Literature - Fall 1998

Introduction to Shakespeare is designed to be valuable to students in many ways: it satisfies the T4 requirement; it fulfills a lower-division requirement for the literature major; it provides excellent training in reading and writing about literature. However, above all, it introduces students to major works by one of the most important figures in Western literature, a writer whose works have played a major part in cultural debates inside and outside the English speaking world, one of the great verbal artists whose work still challenges and gives pleasure.

I presume no prior knowledge of Shakespeare, although nearly everybody coming to the class seems to have read at least one play before, usually Romeo and Juliet . I do require students who take the course to have fulfilled the Subject A requirement in advance.

The class will meet on MWF 2:00-3:10 pm for lectures. Enrollment should be unlimited. There will be mandatory assigned discussion sections led by TAs at various other times. The sections will enable students to discuss the plays and poems, or poems and passages from the plays, in small groups. I require regular and prompt attendance at all lectures and sections.

• Sonnets
• A Midsummer Night's Dream
• The Merchant of Venice
• Measure for Measure
• Othello
• The Bedford Companion to Shakespeare: An Introduction with Documents

I have chosen these plays because their interpretation involves important historical and interpretive issues: the nature of marriage and relations between the sexes; the concept and the rights of authority--the nature of order, law, and justice in society; the place of the foreigner in a community; the role of art in human culture. They are all full of brilliant language, and each usually provides exciting experiences in the theater.

I shall order Pelican editions of all these works; it is desirable that we all use the same edition, and Pelicans are inexpensive. The Bedford Companion is a supplementary book of materials about the age of Shakespeare, history, social customs, playhouse structures, etc; it is relatively inexpensive.

My method is to begin with a couple of lectures on the sonnets in which I exemplify the kind of attentive reading that students should learn if they wish to be sensitive and successful readers of literature and especially of poetry and drama. After that about six lectures are devoted to each play, so that we explore each text thoroughly. I pay particular attention to questions of interpretive choice in relation to their language in performance, since I believe in attending to the origins of these plays in the Elizabethan playhouse and to their production in theaters today; in this connection I use videotapes from time to time in lectures to illustrate problematic passages by showing different interpretations. There is also a series of showings of videotapes in the evenings, attendance at which is not mandatory, although seeing the tapes in the company of other members of the class brings great benefits.

Written work for the course will consist of: four brief quizzes, one on each play; three papers, each of four to five pages, one on a sonnet, the others on a specific passage or a scene from the plays or on an interpretive topic; a midterm, and a final.

In advance of the class I would urge interested students to see any Shakespeare productions that they can during the summer, and especially Shakespeare Santa Cruz's productions of Othello and Much Ado About Nothing (playing mid-July to early September).

Christopher Connery
Oakes 315, tel.: 459.2761
chris_connery@macmail.ucsc.edu
Office hours: Tuesday, 10:00-12:00 or by appointment.

World Literature 123
College 8 240
MWF 11:00-12:10

The 1960s

This course covers selected revolutions, thought, and cultural phenomena from the 1960s. Its perspective is global and historical. It does not attempt to be comprehensive. Revolutionary transformation and liberation are the course's main themes. Students are expected to be thoughtfully, imaginatively, and actively engaged with reading, lectures, film-viewing, music, performance activities, and discussion.

Textbooks

Purchase Textbooks at the Literary Guillotine bookstore downtown: 204 Locust St.

Tariq Ali and Susan Watkins. 1968: Marching in the Streets.

Herbert Marcuse, An Essay on Liberation.

Mao Tse-tung, Quotations From Chairman Mao Tse-tung.

Tom Vague, Televisionaries: The Red Army Faction Story 1963-1993.

Gao Yuan, Born Red.

A thick photocopied reader for pick up at the UCSC Copy Center. Selected contents: Mao Zedong, Frantz Fanon, Che Guevara, Charu Mazumdar, Norman O. Brown, Guy Debord.

Any reading not at the bookstore or in the reader will be handed out in class well in advance of the due date.

Requirements

One take-home midterm essay (about 8 pages long). This will consist of one longer analytical essay that will involve reflection on course concerns, and one short essay that will involve original (and possibly group) research. Students will choose from topics provided by the instructor.

One take-home final (about 10 pages long) that will consist of several essays of varying length, on various aspects of the course. The finals are due on Wednesday, December 16. Late papers not accepted.
During the China unit, students will also coöperate in small groups to make big-character posters (more on this later).
During the Europe and U.S. unit, students will write manifestoes.

Schedule
(subject to change)

Unit 1: The Internationale

Friday, October 2: Listening to music and watching videos.

Begin reading Ali and Watkins, 1968: Marching in the Streets. It must be completed by Wednesday of next week.

Monday, October 5: Introduction to Course Concerns.

Readings(handed out in class on Friday): The 60s Without Apology, pp. 1-9 and 178-216.
Continue reading from Ali and Watkins, 1968: Marching in the Streets.

Wednesday, October 7: The 1960s and World History, 1.

Readings: Ali and Watkins, 1968: Marching in the Streets, entire.

Friday, October 9: The 1960s and World History, 2, plus introduction to China.

Readings: Eric Wolf, Peasant Wars of the Twentieth Century, selections.

Unit 2: Maoism and Cultural Revolution

Monday, October 12: Maoism.

Readings: Mao Zedong, "Analysis of the Classes in Chinese Society," "Investigation of the Peasant Movement in West Hunan."

Wednesday, October 14: Versions of Continuous Revolution.

Readings: Milton, Milton, and Schurman, eds. People's China: Social Experimentation, Politics, Entry onto the World Scene, pp. 210-234.

Friday, October 16: NO LECTURE (Instructor out of town).

See the video of The Red Detachment of Women this week either in class or in the library.

Monday, October 19: Quotations From Chairman Mao and the Politics of the Slogan.

Readings: Quotations From Chairman Mao Tse-tung, all.

Wednesday, October 21: Cultural Revolution Narrative: After the Revolution.

Readings: Born Red, pp. ix-132.

See Born in Flames. this week. Excerpts to be shown in class.

Friday, October 23: Cultural Revolution.

Readings: Born Red, pp. 132-242.

Monday, October 26: Cultural Revolution, 2.

Readings: Born Red, pp. 242-379.

Unit 2: The Third World

Wednesday, October 28: The Naxalbari Rebellion: Annihilation.

Readings: Sankar Ghosh, The Naxalite Movement: A Maoist Experiment, pp. vii-xxiv; Marcus Franda, Radical Politics in West Bengal, pp. 149-182; Samar Sen, Debabrata Panda, Ashish Lahiri, eds., Naxalbari and After: A Frontier Anthology, selections.

Friday, October 30: Poetry and Fiction from the Naxalbari Rebellion.

Readings: Mahasweta Devi, "Draupadi," Gayatri Spivak, trans. and intro. in Gayatri Spivak, In Other Worlds: Essays in Cultural Politics, pp. 179-196; selections from the Thema Book of Naxalite Poetry.

Monday, November 2: Lessons from Naxalbari. Introduction to Fanon

Readings: Review Wednesday and Friday reading.

Wednesday, November 4: Fanon, Nationalism, Third-Worldism.

Readings:The Wretched of the Earth, selections.

Friday, November 6: The Cuban Revolution.

Readings: Che Guevara, selections from Reminiscences of the Cuban Revolutionary War.

Monday, November 9: Cuba.

Readings: Che Guevara, "Song to Fidel," "On Revolutionary Medicine," "Guerilla Warfare: A Method," from John Gerassi, ed. Venceremos: The Speeches and Writings of Ernesto Che Guevara.

Wednesday, November 11: Socialist Man in Cuba.

Readings: Che Guevara, "On the Budgetary System of Financing," "Colonialism is Doomed," "The Death of Imperialism and the Birth of a Moral World," "Man and Socialism in Cuba," "Message to the Tricontinental"from John Gerassi, ed. Venceremos: The Speeches and Writings of Ernesto Che Guevara..

Unit 3: The Airwaves, Europe, and the U.S.A.,

Friday, November 13: DIAL H-I-S-T-O-R-Y (Video watching and Discussion)

Readings: none.

Monday, November 16: DIAL H-I-S-T-O-R-Y 2 (Video watching and Discussion)

Readings: none.

Wednesday, November 18: The Society of the Spectacle

Readings: Selections from The Situationist International.

Friday, November 20: The Situation and May 1968

Readings: "The Poverty of Student Life," "Daniel Cohn-Bendit Interviewed by Jean-Paul Sartre."

Monday, November 23: The Red Army Faction in Germany .

Readings: Tom Vague, Televisionaries, all.

See Germany in the Autumn (Deutschland im Herbst ) video by Wednesday. Class showing tonight.

Wednesday, November 25: Germany in the Autumn.

Readings: Tom Vague, Televisionaries, review. Deutschland im Herbst.

November 26-27: THANKSGIVING HOLIDAY

Monday, November 30: SDS and Weather Underground.

Readings: SDS, "The Port Huron Statement" and "America and the New Era;" "You Don't Need a Weatherman to Know Which Way the Wind Blows" and other Weather Underground documents; Richard Nixon, "Campus Revolutionaries: The Rights of Students.".

Wednesday, December 2: Black Panthers.

Readings: Philip S. Foner, ed., The Black Panthers Speak, pp. x-6, 16-27, 40-70, 93-96, 151-160, 267-291.

Friday, December 4: Manifestoes and Rants.

Readings: Valerie Solanis, The SCUM Manifesto. Other manifestoes TBA.

Monday, December 7: Marcuse.

Readings: Herbert Marcuse, An Essay on Liberation, entire (92 pp.).

Wednesday, December 9: Love, Work and Mystery.

Readings: Norman O. Brown, "Apocalypse: The Place of Mystery in the Life of the Mind;" "Daphne, or Metamorphosis;" "My Georgics." Selections from Love's Body.

Friday, December 11: Conclusion.

Revised 7/19/04.