Course Description:

In conjunction with a series of canonical film and television adaptations of Hamlet and related spin-offs (such as Strange Brew, To Be or Not to Be, and Hamlet 2), we will pursue broad theoretical and philological questions about film adaptations of literary texts: What is the text of Hamlet from the perspective of an editor and from the perspective of a literary critic? The first quarto, second quarto, the Folio? or some conflation of all three? What does it it mean to "unedit" Hamlet? How is editing also a form of translation? How might film adpataiton also be modelled on linguistic translation, language itself understood to be a medium? We will pursue these questions by comparing the Arden two edition of Hamlet of 1992 (a conflation of all three version) with the Arden three edition of 2006 with all the second quarto edited separately in one volume, the first quarto and Folio together in a second volume. To begin to grasp how the text of Hamlet is rendered readable or unreadable when edited (conflated) or "unedited" (not conflated) and then revised for film adaptation, we will turn both to new media theory, especially Avital Ronell's The Telephone Book, contemporary theories of textuaal criticism and editing (creating a critical apparatus-with footnotes, index, and so on--to help the reader understand the text), Walter Benjamin and Paul de Man on translation, and the history of the book. Instead of rendering the text readable by restitching it or by purifying it, we examine the text itself as an "unread -able," spectral effect of its translation into various media, including manuscript (non-existent for Shakespeare), prompt book, printed text, and theatrical performance. In the second half of the course, we will consider how the philological question of reading / editing the text of Hamlet bear on the crisis of liberal democracy and the rise of European fascism in the 1930s, WWII, the Holocaust, the fall of Communist Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union in 1989, and political theology. We will turn first to Jacques Derrida's reading of Hamlet in Spectres of Marx. We will end the course by considering German adaptations of Hamlet. Reading Carl Schmitt and Walter Benjamin's writings on Hamlet, we will ask whether Hamlet is a Tragedy or a Trauerspiel (German for "Mourning Play" and mistranslated as "Tragic Drama"). Why did Germans start saying in the eighteenth century that Hamlet was German? Why did they start giving Hamlet a happy ending? Why did Germans (and the French) take out the ghost scenes and Ophelia scenes and give happy ending (Hamlet survives)? Film and television adaptations of Hamlet will include those directed by Sven Gade, Olivier, Kosintev, BBC Hamlet (strarring Derek Jacobi), Zeffirelli, Baranagh, Gielgud (starring Richard Burton) and the recently released Hamlet starring David Tennant, among others.

Some topics and questions we ill pursue: Hamlet overview of Act 5. Zeffirelli version. Is Hamlet a Tragedy or a Trauerspiel (German for "Mourning Play" and mistranlsated as "Tragic Drama")? What is Tragedy? Is Tragedy limited to Greek Tragedy? Or does it extend to the Renaissance? Does the history of Renaissance Tragedy / mourning play mime the history of Greek Tragedy, each regarded as a history of triumph and then decadence? (Aeshchylus equals Marlowe, Sophocles equals Shakespeare, and Euripides Webster / Ford). What is a Trauerspiel? Is Hamlet a Christian play? What would Christian mean? Sovereignty, States of Emergency, Suspension, Decisionism, andThe Uncanny Return of the Theological in Secularization (Roman Law versus Jewish Law; the Protestant Reformation; Luther and Munster; the Thirty years War; sacrificial economies; the crisis of liberal democracy: the concentration camp as the figure of modernity).

Two students will co-lead class each Thursday on the film screened the preceding Tuesday.

Adaptation versus Translation; Translation as interlinguistic and intralinguistic

"It is perhaps unsuitable to recognize in translated works, from the fact of their translation, merits that might be lacking in similar works written in an original language.  But first, we do not see why the act of the translator should not be appreciated as the quintessential literary act, one which proposes that the reader remain ignorant of the text it reveals to him, and from which his ignorance will not distance him.  Instead, it will bring him closer by becoming active, by representing to him the great interval that separates him from it. It is true that these merits are perhaps only apparent; they have the value of a mirage; they vanish if we are too attentive to them.  Even more, one can evaluate such dangerous qualities.  Too good a bargain, a translated text mimics the effort of creation that, starting from everyday language in which we live and are immersed, seeks to make another language be born, same in appearance and yet, with regard to this language, like its absence, its difference perpetually acquired and constantly hidden. If foreign works encourage and stimulate imitation more than our own works, it is because imitation, in this case, seems to reserve for us a greater personal role, especially because the imitator, fascinated, in the translated text, by the strangeness that the passage from one language to another provokes, thinks that it can take the place of the originality he seeks.  Unfortunately, even if he borrows from his model only what he has the right to borrow, he will forget to be in his turn a translator and he will renounce making his language undergo the transmutation that from one single language must draw out two, one that is read and understood without deviation, while the other remains ignored, silent, and accessible.  Its absence (the shadow of which Tolstoy speaks) is all that we grasp of it."

Theology versus Literature, Politics versus Ethics (Desire, the Other, and Ontology)

The gift of death versus interpretation, figura, rewriting

Schmitt's stage of emergency--decision, sovereignty, secrecy or divine violence (we'll tell you later what we're doing; now is not the time), fear, and separation of politics and literature, military industrial complex versus Benjamin's real state of emergency--a recorrection--the time is now--minimal, temporary correction--weak messianism, hope the violence of the general strike; violence of interpretation (Heidegger on Kant, Panofsky citing Heidegger at the end of Meaning in the Visual Arts, Benjamin on the spool of thread in Berlin Childhood).

Decision (1920 and 30s, Carl Schmitt and Martin Heidegger) and suspension of the ethical as a turn to the political, away from literature as secondary (closure, the real) or indeterminacy-- suspension of the ethical as openness, (re)interpretation, ontological--"let it be" metaphysics--unfolding, hiddenness, no closure, history, aesthetics (work of art) and primacy of literature (ontological over the political--or politics as ontological); the suspension of the ethical as an ontological condition (a tragic view of philosophy, but a hopeful one). Being as a field of tensions.

Abraham and Issac (and G*d and angel) versus God and Jesus

The unspeakable and the sacrifice

The standstill versus the clock

Geist versus spunk (Spirit versus spook)

The Jewish Body (shakes) and the Christian body (wounded; fear and trembling)

The hidden body, the lost body, the foreign body
The Hidden God

The fragile body and the corpse; coperality, travel, and storytelling (Walter Benjamin, The Storyteller and corpses at the clsoe of the trauerspiel in the Origins of the German Trauerspiel; Horoatio on hte slaughter and piled corpses.)

Telepoesis: Writing home in Hamlet ; hte other reporting one's casuse aright versus Rumourin Henry IV, part two

Dialectic of Judaism and Christianity

Play in the Play (puppet theater and props-Vindice's skull in The Revenger's Traegedy and Annabella's heart in 'Tis Pity She's a Whore) as simulation of the court and problem of soverignity-either upholding it or subverting it.

Kant and the problem of metaphysics
Martin Heidegger ; translated by James S. Churchill ; foreword by Thomas Langen.
Author: Heidegger, Martin 1889-1976
Published: Bloomington, Ind. : Indiana University Press, [1962].