SECOND PAPER TOPICS:
General Guidelines: As with your first paper, I am aksing you to formulate your own topic within the parameters of the course. You may write on any one of (or more) of the films we have discussed. You may also discuss both a film or films and one or more of the books (chapters / essays) we have read. You may discuss any one of the texts or discuss two texts together (Ronell and Derrida, for example) in relation to Hamlet. You may discuss the Arden 3 edition of Hamlet with any of the philosophical texts we have read: Ronell and / or Derrida, Benjamin, and Schmitt. Here are some concrete possibilities.
1. Hamlet and the state of emergency. Ronell links the telephone to the state of emergency. Walter Benjamin reads the German Mourning Play in relation to the state of emergency (or what Carl Schmitt calls the state of exception; the German words for both (die) exception and (der) emergency are dervived from "Ausnahme"; CS's and WB's English translators use both English words). http://www.wordreference.com/deen/Ausnahme-
How might our understanding of sovereignty as he who decides the exception and Hamlet be developed by reading Hamlet as a play about the telephone? How might our understanding of Hamlet as a tragedy or as a mourning play be developed by reading Hamlet as a play about the telephone? To what extent is sovereignty answerable, if it exists at all in the play? (feel fre to bring in other media such as letters, Hamlet's tables, and so on.)
2. Hamlet, mass media, spectrality, and sovereignty. A number of films we have watched foreground modern communications technologies (the Doran and Almereyda Hamlets; McKenzie brothers' Strange Brew; Kaurismaki's Hamlet Goes Business). Consider how Hamlet (as a ghost / detective story) allegorizes the relation between an obsolete or nearly obsolete means of production (the factory, the corporation, the brewery) and patriarchal reproduction. What kinds of hauntological or hauntechnological effects do we see in these Hamlet film adaptations and spin-offs? What kinds of conjuring and exorcism? What difference does a happy ending make in terms of exorcism? Or changing Hamlet into Pamela? What kinds of haunting does these revisions to the story try to lay to rest, and the remedies successful (do they work out or not)? Does Hamlet Goes Business have a happy ending?
3. Gender and tragedy. Schmitt focuses his argument about Hamlet and tragedy on Gertrude and Hecuba. How does his focus bear on the female Hamlets we have watched (Sven Gade and McKenzie Bros)? Is tragedy (Schmitt's notion of it) implicitly masculine (as well as Catholic)? Whereas Benjamin's mourning play might be seen as feminized?
4. Why is Hamlet so important to both Schmitt and Benjamin? How does an understanding of tragedy bear on an understanding of sovereignty?
5. Surveillance in Hamlet and Derrida's visor effect. Derrida says that it doesn't matter whether Old Hamlet's beaver is up or not. Is he right? Why or why not? Address this issue with the Arden 3 Hamlet and / or one or more Hamlet (related) films we have discussed in class.
6. The play-within-the play is central to Carl Schmitt's reading of Hamlet. More precisely, it is the play before the play-within-the-play that Schmitt discsuses (the Player King). It is developed in Strange Brew in new ways as a film-within-a-film. In Hamlet, a dumbshow precedes the Moustrap. Critics have wondered why Claudius is so slow to catch on (he interrupts the talking version before it is finished) and directors often cut one or the other. Explore the two plays as silent and sound film versions of Hamlet in Almereyda's Hamlet, Gade's Hamlet and Stange Brew. How might the excess of plays (plots) in the play relate to the questions of tragedy and sovereignty raised by Schmitt and Benjamin?
7. Nazis and Hamlet. To Be or Not to Be (dir. Ernst Lubitsch, 1942) and Inglorious Basterds both involve repetitions (Lubitsch's film ends with a pattern we've seen earlier; the title cites the most famous line from Hamlet; Tarantino's film is a remake of Inglorious Bastards. How might the undending repetition and revision of the story of the Nazis (play-in-a-play and film-in-a-film) in these cases relate to a probem of ending or decision (answer the question, act) in Hamlet as adapted / cited in these films?
8. Mourning and communications technologies. Do film and photography in some the films already mentioned allow for self-reflection and mourning? Or do htey block mourning?