TF 9:30-10:50 (section 01) and 11:00-12:20 (section 02)

Dr. Jean E. Graham

Office hours: R 10:30-12:00 and 3:00-4:30. See Canvas.

graham@tcnj.edu

Course description: In this class, students explore the cultural “work” performed in the areas of gender and sexuality, as well as developing an ability to read early modern English and learning the conventions of each subgenre of Shakespeare play: comedy, tragedy, history, and romance. Class readings will include excerpts from early modern documents that provide a context for the plays.

Prerequisites: none.

Course units: 1 (4 semester hours).  This course is 4 semester hours because:

1. e) the students are assigned to work in groups on one or more learning projects and the group work unfolds during the fourth hour, for which no classroom space is required, since students meet in the library or in their dorm rooms or dorm lounges, or other spaces at their convenience, and
2. f) the students are assigned additional learning tasks that make the semester’s learning experience more deeply engaged and rigorous, and no additional classroom space is needed.

You should plan for an average of 10 hours a week of work for this course, including class meetings. (That is, 4 courses at TCNJ = a full-time job.)

Place in the Curriculum: This course counts toward:

1) the English major, as a course in pre-1660 literary history, or as an English elective (but not as a British literature course for English secondary education majors);

2) the English minor, as an elective;

3) Liberal Learning Option C, as a course in Literary, Visual, and Performing Arts;

4) the following Interdisciplinary Concentrations (Liberal Learning Option A): Classical and Early Modern British Literary Studies, European Literary Studies; and

5) the Civic Responsibility of Gender in Liberal Learning.

English Department Learning Goals: The course is designed to help students develop in the following areas:

1.      students will be able to demonstrate familiarity with a range of critical, generic, and literary traditions (including recent theoretical approaches) that shape – and are shaped by – literary discourses and texts of particular periods or movements.
   2.      students will be able to describe the effects of social constructions of identity on a particular literary text and on current debates over aesthetic value, universality, and canonicity.
   3.      students will be able to identify historically specific elements relevant to a particular text.
   4.      students will be able to read a literary work and characterize its main aesthetic, structural, and rhetorical strategies in an argumentative, thesis-driven essay.

Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Department Learning Goals:

1. Students will gain an understanding of gender as a central category of analysis that compels constant inquiry into the production and legitimization of knowledge.
2. Students will analyze historical and contemporary systems of privilege and oppression, with special attention to the ways gender intersects with race, class, ethnicity, sexuality, religion, and nationality.
3. Students will gain a critical awareness of the instability of identity categories.

Humanities and Social Sciences Learning Goals and Outcomes:

#1 Written Communication

#5 Critical Analysis and Reasoning:  Ability to critique the arguments of others in the discipline and the construction of one’s own arguments in the discipline, using data/evidence as a focus of instruction and/or the ability to analyze cultural patterns

#6 Information Literacy:  Evaluating the validity and/or reliability of a source

#7 Interpret Language and Symbol

#12 Understanding power of words

#14 Sensitivity to historicity of texts

Learning Goals for the Civic Responsibility of Gender:

• Students should be able to explain how gender and sexuality shape our daily lives.  They should understand how gender is a central category of analysis that informs our interpretation of human experience.
• Students should understand that gender is socially constructed.  They should be able to analyze family, education, labor, religion, and government as they are shaped by gendered constructs.  Further, they should be able to explain how gender intersects with other constructed patterns of privilege and oppression in society, such as race, ethnicity, class, and sexual orientation.
• Students should develop skills in the application of gender research and theory to problems in the contemporary world.

Required texts:

Shakespeare, Henry V, Folger Shakespeare Library. Edited by Barbara A. Mowat and Paul Werstine.

Shakespeare, Macbeth, Bedford St. Martin’s Texts and Contexts Edition. Edited by William C. Carroll.

Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Bedford St. Martin’s Texts and Contexts Edition. Edited by Gail Kern Paster and Skiles Howard.

Shakespeare, Othello, Bedford St. Martin’s Texts and Contexts Edition. Edited by Kim F. Hall.

Shakespeare, Richard III, Folger Shakespeare Library. Edited by Barbara A. Mowat and Paul Werstine.

Shakespeare, The Taming of the Shrew, Bedford St. Martin’s Texts and Contexts Edition. Edited by Frances E. Dolan.

Shakespeare, The Tempest, Bedford St. Martin’s Case Studies in Critical Controversy Edition. 2^nd edition. Edited by Gerald Graff and James Phelan.

Shakespeare, Twelfth Night, Bedford St. Martin’s Texts and Contexts Edition. Edited by Bruce R. Smith.

Shakespeare, Othello, Bedford St. Martin’s Texts and Contexts Edition. Edited by Kim F. Hall.

Shakespeare, Richard III, Folger Shakespeare Library. Edited by Barbara A. Mowat and Paul Werstine.

Shakespeare, The Taming of the Shrew, Bedford St. Martin’s Texts and Contexts Edition. Edited by Frances E. Dolan.

Shakespeare, The Tempest, Bedford St. Martin’s Case Studies in Critical Controversy Edition. 2^nd edition. Edited by Gerald Graff and James Phelan.

Shakespeare, Twelfth Night, Bedford St. Martin’s Texts and Contexts Edition. Edited by Bruce R. Smith.

For the complete syllabus, see Canvas.