King Lear, Acts IV & V; Final Paper FAQ

For next time, please finish reading King Lear. At the end of class, we'll watch portions Akira Kurosawa's movie, Ran (乱), a rewriting of Lear set in feudal Japan.

A few words about the final. There will be two options: either a) you can do the take-home assignment, where you choose 3 out of 4 questions to write about, for a total of 4-5 pages; or b) you design a topic yourself and write a 4-5 page paper about it.

If you're interested in the second option, I recommend thinking about a question that strikes you as interesting, but which doesn't strike you as having an immediately recognizable answer. "What is the relationship between the Fool's irony and Edgar's nonsense?" might be such a question. Or, "What is the role of women in More's Utopia?" Or, "How are animals used in Lear and Gulliver's Travels?" Or even, "What are the differences between Shakespeare's King Lear and the Emperor in Kurosawa's Ran?"

Anything we have read or watched in the second half of the course is open for discussion, but at least one key work must be a written text.

Once you come up with an interesting question or two, attune your ears and eyes so that you begin looking and listening for spots where that question arises.

If you choose to write a paper, you'll need to send me a quick one-paragraph prospectus explaining what you want to write about, with three key quotations that you will analyze; that will be due in two weeks. In the meantime, please send me any questions you have, or drop by my office hours (T 2.20-3.20), or ask for a more convenient time to meet.

Happy Weekending!

King Lear, Acts II and III

Like I said in class, please read Acts II and III to your section next week. Also, bring along three questions to turn in to me:

• One textual question: it could be something that puzzles you, intrigues you, or just sounds interesting / beautiful / strange to you.
  
• One historical question.
• And one thematic question; remember, look for things that repeat... it could deal with a character and their motivations, irony, or one of the themes we've been discussing.

Oh, and that "In Search of Shakespeare" documentary I mentioned is just a quick google search away. You might add in "1of4". Also readily available online, I'm sure: Shakespeare in Love. If you haven't seen it, it's pretty good, and borrows a lot from Shakespeare's actual work.

King Lear, Act I

Hey class, here's the questions for this week! As I'm sure you've gathered from the sonnets, Shakespeare loves disguising ideas / metaphors / feelings in his language. As you read, I recommend picking out words and ideas that seem to recur. I give four examples below--nature, animals, authority, nothing--but there are far more; keep an eye out for others!

Q1 (Carol C.): The word "nature" seems to come up again and again in Act I; Lear mentions it several times, and Edmund, Gloucester's illegitimate son, seems obsessed with it. Note the spots where the term or idea comes up, and talk about what's behind it's ubiquity. (Hint: Different characters might be interested in it for different reasons).

Q2 (Sam): What do you make of this character, the Fool? What seems to be his function in the play? Does he remind you of anyone in anything else you've read / seen?

Q3 (Alice): Do you notice any similarities, either in language or in theme, between this first act of King Lear and the sonnets?

Q4 (Mia): Look carefully at the setting and stage directions of the various scenes. How important are they? How do they affect how we should interpret what happens in the dialog?

Q5 (Jenny): Animals are just everywhere in this first act, typically as metaphors or analogies. Why? Find some spots that strike you as interesting.

Q6 (Isabella): Summarize the responses of Lear's three daughters to his request that they declare how much they love him. Who seems the most sincere?

Q7 (Ashley): In Act I, Scene 4, Kent (in disguise) tells Lear that he has the look of "Authority"; does he, really? How would you describe the King's authority over the course of this first act of the play?

Q8 (Anne): This word "nothing," like nature, seems to come up again and again and again. Why? Pick out some spots where you think something interesting might be going on.

Utopia / Dystopia: Study Questions

Check the post below for the homework (from More's Utopia and Woody Allen's Sleeper, 90min, available on YouTube). Now on to the questions!

Q1 (Demi): In Raphael's description, King Utopus said that he "suspected that God perhaps likes diverse and manifold forms of worship and therefore deliberately inspired different people with different views" (Utopia, 580). What are some of the beliefs of the Utopians? How does King Utopus's statement jive with the depiction of More in A Man for All Seasons that we watched in class this week?

Q2 (Annie): At the end of Utopia, the character of "More" says this: "when Raphael had finished his story, I was left thinking that not a few customs and laws he had described as existing among the Utopians were quite absurd. Their methods of waging war, their religious practices, and their social customs were some of these, but my chief objection was to the basis of their whole system, that is, their communal living and their money economy" (588). Why does he say this? How closely should we take the character of "More" to resemble the actual views of More, the author?

Q3 (Jason): What is the Utopians' take on the relationship between pleasure and an ethical life? And how does it compare with the ways in which pleasure is depicted in Sleeper?

Q4 (Jill): More inarguably designed his island of Utopia in response to social / political / moral problems he saw in early 16th-century England. Based on what you saw in A Man for All Seasons, what are the principle problems he tries to address in Utopia?

Q5 (Kate): Golden chamberpots?! In Utopia? Why?!

Q6 (Rachel): Why is slavery so essential in Utopia?

Q7 (Tina): What exactly is More's argument about the fictionality of Utopia in his final letter to Peter Giles, pp. 589-90?

Q8 (Vicky): If More's Utopia was designed in response to the problems and preoccupations More saw in early 16th-century England, then we can fairly safely say that Woody Allen's Dys-topia in Sleeper was written in response to certain 1973 American problems and preoccupations. Based on what you've seen in that movie, what were Americans worried about and obsessed with at that time?

Dystopia: Sleeper (1973)

Your homework for next week is to read More's Utopia (1516), pp. 556-63, 569-74, 579-90, and also to watch Woody Allen's dystopic comedy, Sleeper (1973):



Links to parts 1-9 of the movie should be linked to the clip if you open it in YouTube. Happy watching!

More's Utopia: Page Numbers and Study Questions

Re-reading More's Utopia, I've decided that not all of Book I is absolutely necessary to read--the descriptions of the island of Utopia are far more interesting. This'll keep your total reading for this week the same, and cut way down on next week's. So, for 5/4, please just read:

• "Thomas More to Peter Giles, Greetings" (521-24)
  
• Book I, only through Raphael's dialog with the Cardinal about thieves, slaves and the death penalty (524-35)
  
• And then from Book II, just up to the section entitled "The Travels of the Utopians" (545-56)
  

QUESTIONS:

Q1 (Sophia): How would you describe the tone of the opening letter to Peter Giles? If you had read it without knowing that Utopia wasn’t a real place, and that Raphael was a made-up character, what would you think? How does that effect the tone?

Q2 (James): What do you make of Raphael’s argument against private property? What historical events does More seem to be reacting to? (Hint: check out this passage, “Your sheep . . . that used to be so meek and eat so little. Now they are becoming so greedy and wild that they devour human beings themselves, as I hear,” p. 531).

Q3 (Emily): What do you think of Raphael’s alternative to capital punishment as a penalty for theft?

Q4 (Carrie): Why does More set Utopia in the Americas (i.e., in the “New World”)?

Q5 (Mardy): Based on what you have read about Utopia so far, what do you think would be the ramifications if certain of their laws and customs were imported to Taiwan? Pick a couple. (Bonus: Is a Utopia, or perfect society, possible?)

Q6 (Debbie): Say something about the “occupations” of the Utopians (550-53).

Q7 (Verthandi): Say something about the “social relations” of the Utopians (553-56).

Q8 (Valerie): What do you make of this Raphael Hythloday figure? How seriously do you think we should take him? (Hint: Look at the early footnote about his name; does that undercut what he says, or does it merely relieve More of responsibility for his character’s controversial ideas?)

Midterm Tips

As all of you finish up your studying, here's a few last minute tips:

1. Once again, re-reading all of the words in each of the texts might not be the best way to use your study time. Instead, go back through the texts and look for key passages that you think will be important, or that you think you could write an essay about; remind yourself of the basic order of events in each text, but only focus on what you think is important in the context of the class. Study, in other words, strategically.
   
2. Get those passages straight in your head so that you don't have to flip open the book to re-remember what they were about; the test will be timed (2hrs), and searching for the 100% perfect quote will, more often than not, waste more time than it will save you. I recommend keeping a closed book for the first half, in fact.
   
3. To refresh your understanding of the history of the texts, read the Norton introductions to them, and to the periods. Also, in the Chaucer handouts, it might be helpful to read the bits and pieces of the tales that come before and after The Miller's and the Wife of Bath's tales.
   
4. Practice reading a few sonnets you've never seen before. (Hint: For inspiration, push the Shakespeare bobble-head doll, pictured right.)
   
5. Write some sample questions, and organize the texts and quotations you might use to answer them.
6. Practice your facility with meter by reading Shakespeare's Sonnet 12 (pp. 1062-63), and marking the stresses and unstresses... then decide what that meter is emphasizing. I'll note some interesting things about the meter in the comments below.

Happy studying! If all goes as planned, we'll watch a movie in the last part of class tomorrow.