Final
Exam Paper: A Defense of Shakespeare
For your
Final Exam paper, you’re going to revise your essential thesis/approach from
your Mid-Term paper with the following twist: imagine you are a professor,
director, or actor who is giving a talk to an English department at University
X, which is contemplating dropping Shakespeare from the curriculum. In many universities (including ECU), the
so-called “Great Books” of Canon of English Literature is under fire. As Siobhan Kilfeather, formerly of Columbia
University, wrote,
“You’ve
got people of mixed ability...many of them going into the sciences, and they’re
asked to take a required lit course.
This is very difficult material to be read quickly...They’re all being
asked to make a very real stretch when many of them can’t read a modern novel
easily...people had substantial difficulties reading the texts; they couldn’t
sort out the information and handle it: what it means for books to come from
different periods; what it meant to move from one culture to another. It was water off a duck’s back” (Denby,
203).
In other words,
since students have no background in reading Shakespeare (or other ‘old’
writers), we can’t possibly teach them how to do it. They can’t relate, they can’t read it on a sophisticated level,
so Shakespeare—and other canonical writers—should be abandoned for more
‘practical’ reading/writing skills.
After all, you don’t need Shakespeare to learn organic chemistry! So your job is to show why Shakespeare
is global in scope and connects to modern ideas, characters, or issues through
his use of thematic connections.
Whatever you wrote about in your Mid-Term paper is the ‘frame’ for your
discussion. Revise, expand, or re-work
your mid-term paper as a talk to a very specific audience (skeptical college
professors) using evidence from the plays, adaptations, and critical
sources. Consider how watching Chinese
opera and reading modern-day adaptations of The Tempest might play into
your discussion. How does your theme
‘translate’ in these versions, and why do we still need to know the original to
see this?
REMEMBER,
you do not need to write a new paper here. Use your Mid-Term as the “bones” of the paper, but focus it by
considering your audience, and how you can prove that Shakespeare is a global,
rather than a historical, author. Try
to respond to the fears of people like Dr. Kilfeather (above), who truly feel
that Shakespeare is a lost art—and somewhat irrelevant to the needs of the
modern undergraduate.
BASIC
REQUIREMENTS
- 7-8 pages at least (but you
can certainly do more)
- Should discuss at least 2 plays
from class
- Should reference/discuss at
least 2 adaptations to broaden your discussion: a traditional film, a
‘global’ adaptation (Chinese Opera, foreign language Shakespeare, etc.),
graphic novel, or related literary work (one of the Tempest poems, A
Tempest, etc.)
- Should use 2-3 critical
articles to support your ideas, ideally from the Norton editions
- DUE ON OUR FINAL EXAM DAY: WEDNESDAY, MAY 7th BY 5PM
