Saturday, February 04, 2006
#3 in the Guest Lecture Series
Surely, a treat to be honored with such a dramatic presentation as this lecturer's. What I was thinking is how Shakespeare's language, though poetic, can sometimes be lost on the page. Often I've found, as I'm sure most of us have, that reading aloud helps flesh out, (flesh and blood), the intent of each word. This guy was a true dramaturgist, he knew his stuff and he knew every beat of the play, also lost sometimes in translation. I'm no Shakespeare expert, but I always enjoy a good reading of a play.
He brought up some great questions to think about, probably for the entire semester, and those two things which are universal in critical analysis of any piece of literature are--Genre and Gender. Or as he put it Jander. What is Will trying to expose when he dresses boys as girls pretending to be boys? And more importantly, how does this effect our expectations of genre: comedy/romance/tragedy? Is Shakespeare still a revolutionary, after 400 years, I think so, definately. Our lecturer also briefly left us with the theoretical question, what is gender, if nothing than a convention, a trope, a performance.
I'm reminded of Judith Butler, theorist and critic, who wrote about gender as performance, as a kind of mask that reveals at the same time our social determinations of gender. The way men are 'supposed to act' and likewise women. Are these gender roles just characters performed for the stability of mainsteam society? Or rather--Hetero-normative roles?
He brought up some great questions to think about, probably for the entire semester, and those two things which are universal in critical analysis of any piece of literature are--Genre and Gender. Or as he put it Jander. What is Will trying to expose when he dresses boys as girls pretending to be boys? And more importantly, how does this effect our expectations of genre: comedy/romance/tragedy? Is Shakespeare still a revolutionary, after 400 years, I think so, definately. Our lecturer also briefly left us with the theoretical question, what is gender, if nothing than a convention, a trope, a performance.
I'm reminded of Judith Butler, theorist and critic, who wrote about gender as performance, as a kind of mask that reveals at the same time our social determinations of gender. The way men are 'supposed to act' and likewise women. Are these gender roles just characters performed for the stability of mainsteam society? Or rather--Hetero-normative roles?
# posted by Collin @ 8:59 PM 
