Fall 2023 Honors Seminar ~ NOTE: At the instructor’s discretion, this course may count towards a history, geography or topic depending on the subject of the student’s major project.
EXILES, REFUGEES AND DEAD QUEENS
Professor Laura Levine
lauraellenlevine@outlook.com
THEA_UT 801.002 ~ 4 credits
Tuesday 10:00 a.m. - 1:30 p.m.
When Virgil’s lovers Dido and Aeneas meet, they are both refugees, Dido, Queen of Carthage, a refugee from the city of Tyre, Aeneas one of the few survivors of the Trojan War. But where Aeneas goes on to found Rome, Dido is a suicide, her funeral pyre the last thing Aeneas sees as he sails away from Carthage. What is the politics of gender in The Aeneid? How does Elena Ferrante redefine them in her retelling of the Dido story in My Brilliant Friend, a novel whose account of the rise of neo-fascism in post-war Italy seems particularly relevant now? Differently, what is the iconic significance of a dead queen in Shakespeare’s corpus? In what way is the “dead” queen Hermione in The Winter’s Tale, a flash point for religious tensions and anxieties about witchcraft? And how is Christopher Wheeldon’s ballet of The Winter’s Tale a revision of the problems Shakespeare presents?
Students with backgrounds or interests in ballet, art history, gender, opera, and the classics are particularly welcome, but these are in no way a prerequisite for the course. Examples of projects that might grow out of the course could include connections between Shakespeare and Queen Elizabeth or Elizabeth and Dido (also called “Elissa”), dramatic and operatic adaptations of The Aeneid, Shakespeare ballets, and many others. Please send applications embedded in the body of the text as cut and paste documents (no attachments, pdfs, google docs, zip files etc.).
Include your graduation date, studio, advisor, and the names of all previous theatre studies faculty.
*NOTE: At the instructor’s discretion, this course may count towards a history, geography or topic depending on the subject of the student’s major project.