UB Honors

Revenge: Topic of Available English Dept. Honors Course

Posted by admin on October 23, 2006 in Academics, Registration and Seminar Information

The English Department invites sophomores, juniors and senior Honors Scholars to enroll in the following English Honors seminar for the Spring 2007 semester. If you are following the new Honors Requirements it will count as a departmental honors course.

Honors: Revenge
Professor Daniel Hack
TTh 9:30 - 10:50
Registration through the Undergraduate Office, 303 Clemens

Revenge is one of the oldest topics in Western literature and remains to this day a ubiquitous element in popular culture. And no wonder: revenge serves as a ready-made source of narrative energy, suspense, and violence, while at the same time raising fundamental questions about justice, human nature, and agency. To study revenge, then, means to study much else besides, from questions of literary history and form to the relationships between desire and duty, emotion and reason, nature and culture, the primitive and the modern, past and present, parents and children, remembrance and forgiveness, and the individual and the state (among others!).
As we tackle these issues, we will be particularly alert to changes over time in the ways revenge has been represented. We will find that not only do attitudes toward revenge differ, but so too do the issues it is seen to engage with, as well as the sheer level of interest in the topic (despite its seeming ubiquity). To get at some of these diverse understandings and uses of revenge, we will consider a broad range of materials. We will begin by reading key texts from two bodies of work in which revenge plays a dominant role: ancient Greek tragedy and early modern English tragedy. We will then move on to (and spend the greatest amount of our time with) the Victorian novel, a genre in which the place of revenge is intriguingly uncertain. We will conclude with a look at some treatments of revenge in contemporary American film, personal narrative, and possibly fiction.

Tentative reading and viewing list:
Aeschylus, Oresteia
Euripides, Orestes
Thomas Kyd, The Spanish Tragedy
William Shakespeare, Hamlet
Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights
Wilkie Collins, Basil
Charles Dickens, Great Expectations
Arthur Conan Doyle, A Study in Scarlet
Laura Blumenfeld, Revenge: A Story of Hope
Clint Eastwood (dir.), Unforgiven
Steven Spielberg (dir.), Munich

Requirements: Class participation, short response papers, a 7-8 page essay, and a 12-15 page essay.