NEH Seminar for College Teachers: King Lear and Shakespeare Studies
Dates: July 10 – 28, 2017
Location: The University of Chicago
Project Director: Richard Strier
Application Deadline: March 1, 2017; notification date: March 31, 2017
Stipend: $2,700 per participant
This seminar will provide its participants with the opportunity to spend 3 weeks focusing on the work that many consider Shakespeare’s greatest play, King Lear. It will attempt to see the play through many lenses: in formal terms; in its historical contexts; and in its life beyond Shakespeare’s time. The seminar will first be devoted to coming to terms with the material existence of the play, the two early texts of it. We will then read the sources for the play and look into some of its afterlife. We will read the version of the play by Nahum Tate (1681) and then jump to the last third of the 20th century and discuss two film versions of the play. We will next dive into criticism and scholarship: “Old” and “New” historicism (on religion); criticism that deals with social and political issues; “character” and psychoanalytic criticism; “New Critical” approaches; and current trends in literary criticism. The aim of the seminar is not to answer the textual, historical, and critical questions that it raises, but to show how compelling these questions are.
Tenured, tenure-track, and full-time non-tenure track instructors are welcome to apply. Three to five of the sixteen spaces will be specifically held for full-time non-tenure track college and university instructors. For further information, please visit: https://lucian.uchicago.edu/blogs/neh2017lear/[lucian.uchicago.edu]