Shakespeare
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Shakespeare in Boston
Boston Public Library aims to cut through 400 years of literary analysis and explore the pages of Shakespeare’s original writings, including some of his most famous works. The Boston Public Library has a new exhibition, “Shakespeare Unauthorized,” which features four Shakespearean…
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Baby Geniuses
The concepts of genius and IQ have long been instruments of cultural and economic control. For Slate, Dana Goldstein examines how Donald Trump has bought into these ideas: Trump’s adoration of IQ testing recalls an especially disturbing period in the…
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Shakespeare Didn’t Make up as Many Words as We Think
For the Guardian, Alison Flood writes on the bias of the Oxford English Dictionary towards “famous literary examples” instead of the actual origin, resulting in the incorrect attribution of several still-used words and phrases to Shakespeare. Flood writes that there are multitudes…
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Weekly Geekery
Phillip K. Dick’s holy spirits—or hallucinations? Lovecraftian scientific horror in Stranger Things. Shakespeare + math = … Narcissists doth make psychiatrists of us all. As women of color win science fiction awards, ATTACK OF THE RABID PUPPIES!
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By the People, for the People
At Guernica, Tana Wojcznick unpacks Shakespeare’s lesser-known and often-misread play, Coriolanus, to bring us s its timely political warning about populism and democracy: It’s no accident that Coriolanus is not a favorite in America, where it’s rarely included in the…
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The Saturday Rumpus Interview with Jesse Lee Kercheval
I have learned to put myself, my ego, to one side and truly experience someone else’s poetry.
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Conceptualizing the Vagina
At Lit Hub, Dr. Fay Bound Alberti shares an excerpt of her new book, This Mortal Coil: The Human Body in History and Culture, exploring the cultural understandings and depictions of female genitalia from Shakespeare’s “No thing” to Jamie McCartney’s The…
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Weekly Geekery
Boy meets lichen, proves 150 years of science textbooks wrong. Want to improve your social skills? Try fiction, not speed-dating. How wasps gave us Shakespeare. In psychology, American undergrad = caveman. Birds lose sex appeal when singing over city noise.…
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The Sunday Rumpus Interview: Janine Joseph
The day the manuscript became Driving without a License was the day I said “yes” to the truth of my own life and coming-of-age experience as an undocumented immigrant.
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Who Cares Who Wrote Shakespeare?
At Guernica, Tana Wojczuk shares her personal story of seeing Shakespeare performed as a child and her eventual realization and understanding of Shakespeare’s humor, and defends the importance of seeing Shakespeare’s works on stage: This is one of the reasons it…
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Signifying Nothing
Shakespeare’s texts are anything but stagnant, often taking on new meanings depending on the context in which they’re experienced. In an excerpt from The Maximum Security Book Club, Mikita Brottman describes her experience of teaching Shakespeare in a maximum security…
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In Favor of Reading the Literary Canon
The canon is what it is, and anyone who wishes to understand how it continues to flow forward needs to learn to swim around in it. Responding to Yale students’ protesting the English department’s course requirements, Slate’s Katy Waldman argues…