LITERATURA Y ESTUDIOS CULTURALES: SHAKESPEARE EN LA CULTURA POPULAR
Cod.24413076
CONTENIDOS DE LA ASIGNATURA
1. CULTURAL STUDIES
This unit will provide a theoretical introduction to cultural studies. It will cover basic critical concepts and terminology for the academic analysis of popular culture as it is practiced in the field of Cultural Studies. It will also introduce the contemporary debate about the nature of popular culture, examining the main theoretical approaches. The module will also establish basic analytic concepts and issues crucial to understanding uses of and allusions to Shakespeare in popular culture. We will explore the vexed and often ambivalent relationship between so-called “high” or canonical culture and popular culture. In some cases, the adaptation of “high” culture into popular forms and idioms has been regarded as a harbinger of cultural degradation; in other cases, it has been seen as a welcome sign of democratization, desacralization of the canon, and increased relevance to the modern world. We will also examine how popular culture is linked to the emergence of new forms of mass media, the effects of which have been hotly debated. The question of how artworks linked to older media (like the book and the theatre) have adapted to contemporary societies profoundly shaped by new media will be of considerable relevance to our analysis of Shakespeare’s adaptation to new media like film, television, mass market fiction, and the internet. We will also have occasion to address a controversial distinction fundamental to the study of Shakespeare in popular culture, the distinction between adaptation and appropriation.
1.1. The debate between high culture and popular culture: Q.D. Leavis, Theodor Adorno, Dwight MacDonald and Pierre Bourdieu.
1.2. Critical approaches to Mass Media: Walter Benjamin, Marshall McLuhan, Henry Jenkins, Jay Bolter and Richard Grusin.
1.3. Adaptation and Appropriation: John Fiske, Dick Hebdige, Paul Willis and Terence Hawkes.
2. SHAKESPEARE IN POPULAR FICTION
Through several examples, this unit will examine how Shakespearean characters and plots, as well as the biography of Shakespeare, have been appropriated and rewritten in works of popular fiction.
The novel remains the dominant literary mode of the modern age, and a key component of popular literary culture. Accordingly, this module addresses several means by which Shakespeare’s works and biography have been rewritten in modern novel. We will begin this unit by distinguishing several types of novelistic appropriation of Shakespeare: “novelization,” the conversion of a Shakespearean work to prose fiction form; the “mash-up,” in which Shakespeare is brought together with a specific popular culture work or genre, typically to comic effect; the “spinoff,” in which a minor Shakespearean character is given his or her own narrative plotline; and the “prequel” or “sequel,” in which the writer imagines what happened before or after the narrative Shakespeare tells; and “fan-fiction,” in which the writer imagines interactions between Shakespearean characters that do not appear in Shakespeare’s plays.
We will then examine some adaptational strategies by which fiction writers reshape Shakespeare’s narratives for their own purposes. This section of the course will introduce students to such features of narrative as focalization, description, dialogue, subplotting and heteroglossia. Finally, we will analyse how Shakespeare’s works and biography have been reshaped to fit the generic conventions of popular fiction, particularly genres like the detective novel, children’s literature, the historical novel, and the postmodern novel.
2.1. Types of Appropriation and Adaptation: Rewriting, quotation, “mash-up”, “spin-off” and “sequel”.
2.3. Narratology in fiction and drama: focalization, plot, dialogue and heteroglossia.
3. SHAKESPEARE IN CINEMA AND TV
This unit will examine how the works of Shakespeare interact with the genres, ideological protocols and technologies of mass media for the screen. Film and television are in many ways the signature pop culture forms of the twentieth century, and so any analysis of Shakespeare’s relationship to mass media and popular culture must address how Shakespeare has been adapted for the screen, large and small. This section of the course will address the challenges of adapting Shakespeare to the screen, the various ways in which film and television directors have addressed these challenges, and the many interpretive perspectives that these film adaptations have adopted.
We have divided this module of the course into four sections. The first addresses the oft-neglected era of silent film adaptation of Shakespeare, a period in which directors first learned how to reconceive Shakespeare for the camera and not the stage. The second section addresses the so-called “classic” period of Shakespeare film adaptation, a period from the 1930s to the 1950s that encompasses the adaptations of “classic Hollywood” (Max Reinhardt’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, George Cukor’s Romeo and Juliet) and of European auteurs (Laurence Olivier’s Henry V, Hamlet, and Richard III; Orson Welles’ Othello; Renato Castellani’s Romeo and Juliet). The third section will focus on Shakespeare film adaptations of the 1990s and beyond. Of special note are adaptations in the “Branagh” style (Kenneth Branagh’s Henry V, Much Ado about Nothing, Hamlet, Loves Labours Lost, and As You Like It; Oliver Parker’s Othello; Trevor Nunn’s Twelfth Night; and Michael Radford’s The Merchant of Venice) as well as adaptations that reflect the influence of contemporary youth culture (Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo + Juliet, Michael Almereyda’s Hamlet and Cymbeline, Gil Junger’s 10 Things I Hate About You, and Tim Blake Nelson’s O). Our last section will address the special nature of televisual adaptation of Shakespeare, addressing such issues as filming techniques specific to television, composition of television audiences, and the differences between film and television. Our study examples will be taken from the BBC-Time Life Shakespeare series and the Shakespeare Retold series.
3.1. Silent cinema and “theatrical” cinema: e.g. Dimitri Buchowetski, Svend Gade, Frederick Warde.
3.2. Hollywood classic cinema and European auteur cinema: e.g. Max Reinhardt, Orson Welles, Laurence Olivier.
3.3. The “Branagh” style and youth culture: e.g. Kenneth Branagh, Baz Luhrmann, Michael Almereyda.
3.4. TV Adaptation: BBC Time Life series, Shakespeare Retold.
4. SHAKESPEARE AND VISUAL CULTURE
This unit will critically explore how Shakespeare’s works and face have been disseminated in various visual genres, including graphic novels, cartoons, advertising and illustrated children’s books. A noteworthy trend in modern popular culture is its insistent visuality, a quality that poses a special challenge for an artist like Shakespeare, since his reputation and authority is so bound up with the extraordinary, particular qualities of his language. This unit will address a number of ways in which Shakespeare’s work has been transposed into and disseminated throughout modern visual culture. We will also examine some of the effects that transformation into visual terms has upon the meaning of Shakespeare’s works and his cultural stature.
We begin by examining techniques by which Shakespeare’s works have been transposed into visual form, using illustrated editions, comic book and graphic novel adaptations of Shakespeare as our primary study examples. We will also have occasion to address animated film adaptation of Shakespeare. This discussion will build upon techniques of Shakespeare adaptation that we addressed in Units 2 and 3. We will then analyse how Shakespearean images have been appropriated for commercial purposes in advertising. Our last analytic unit will address how Shakespeare’s works have been adapted to interactive digital culture by analysing viewer-constructed videos from YouTube and editions of Shakespeare for the iPad.
At the end of this module, we will invite students to look back over the course and reflect upon the implications of converting Shakespeare to post-verbal form in contemporary culture. We will ask, what is gained and what is lost? What elements of Shakespeare resist post-verbal adaptation? How does post-verbal Shakespeare address the debate between “high” and “pop” culture with which the course began?
4.1. Illustrations and graphic novels. Shakespearean narratives in hybrid visual forms.
4.2. Iconic Shakespeare: Shakespeare in advertising, comics and cartoons
4.3. Shakespeare in the contemporary visual: Shakespeare in youtube and for iPad.
