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HS Shakespeare's Heroes- Lecturer
- Dr. Christian Krug
- Details
- Hauptseminar
2 cred.h, Sprache Englisch
Time and place: Thu 16:15 - 17:45, C 301
- Prerequisites / Organisational information
- BA-Studium (Studienrichtungen Literary Studies, Cultural Studies, British Studies, General Studies) sowie Lehramt. Eine Teilnahme in Master-Studiengängen ist nur unter bestimmten Voraussetzungen und nach vorheriger persönlicher Absprache möglich.
- Contents
- This seminar looks at heroes and heroism in some of Shakespeare’s best-known plays, including Hamlet, Henry V, Julius Caesar and Richard II. ‘Hero’ is a label and must not be confused with the ‘protagonist’ of a play. Heroes serve a social function; they provide a focal point for communities to represent (and negotiate) some of their norms, values and beliefs. Some of Shakespeare’s characters have been appropriated as national heroes – for example, in the late eighteenth century, Hamlet became a quintessential German hero, in the twentieth century, Shakespeare’s play Henry V was staged and filmed as a heroic historical drama, with Harry as an exemplary English national hero. In both cases, it is not so much the ‘deed’ of ‘the hero’ that merits critical attention, but how a character is credited with a surplus of meaning (is ‘fetishized’), why certain actions are taken to be heroic, and what functions they serve in a community that labels them as such. (In fact, a closer look reveals that Hamlet is perhaps not the timid intellectual whose actions consist mainly of words, rather than deeds – something that German scholarship made him out to be. And most of the British characters’ actions in Henry V turn out to be less than ‚heroic’.) We will consider such forms of appropriation, but our main focus will be on the plays and how they use conventionalized discourses of the heroic (or not), and what social and ideological function these serve. In Shakespeare’s plays, ‘heroism’ is celebrated, questioned, parodied and undermined. It includes military deeds and political actions as well as heroic suffering (Richard II) and, perhaps, gluttony (Falstaff).
- Additional information
- Verwendung in folgenden UnivIS-Modulen
- Startsemester SS 2016:
- Core Module Culture (Core Cult)
- Core Module Literature (Core Lit)
- Master Module II: Culture (Master II: Cult)
- Master Module II: Literature (Master II: Lit)
- Department: Chair of English Literature and Culture (Prof. Dr. Feldmann)
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