#Othello moor professional

#Othello moor professional

Eliot's long tenure (1869–1909) transformed the college and affiliated professional schools into a modern research university Harvard was a founding member of the Association of American Universities in 1900. A. Following the American Civil War, President Charles W. Its curriculum and student body were gradually secularized during the 18th century, and by the 19th century, Harvard had emerged as the central cultural establishment among Boston elites. Although never formally affiliated with any denomination, the early College primarily trained Congregational and Unitarian clergy. The Harvard Corporation is its first chartered corporation. Established in 1636 and named for its first benefactor clergyman John Harvard, Harvard is the United States' oldest institution of higher learning, and its history, influence, and wealth have made it one of the world's most prestigious universities. Harvard University is a private Ivy League research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Evaluate why Othello provides continuing material for engaging issues surrounding race, gender, class, colonialism, and other topics.Encounter American Moor, a new play that dramatizes a black actor’s experience auditioning to play Othello.Consider how genre becomes a tool for rewriting Othello from a female perspective.Weigh divergent feminist responses to Othello by Toni Morrison, Djanet Sears, Paula Vogel, and Ann-Marie MacDonald.In Part 4, we continue our study of Othello's afterlives with Toni Morrison's Desdemona and Keith Hamilton Cobb's American Moor. Consider how adaptations bring new meaning to old texts through setting, language, medium, and other artistic choices.Explore music as a means for telling Othello’s “story,” including representing gender, nationality, and race.Discover Otello in the Seraglio, which transposes the play to the Ottoman court, revising the “orientalism” of both the play and its operas.Delve into the history of operatic adaptations of Othello, beginning with the nineteenth-century Italian composers Verdi and Rossini.Part 3 introduces us to Giuseppe Verdi's Otello and Mehmet Ali Sanlikol's Othello in the Seraglio. Discover how two famous African-American actors, among the first black actors to play Othello, interpreted the play and leveraged it for their own activism.Evaluate the multiple meanings available in the play’s variant versions and their implications for performance.Use Othello’s monologue in Act 4 to interpret the handkerchief, one of the play’s most central props/symbols.Compare and contrast Othello’s storytelling with Iago’s machinations to sabotage Othello and Desdemona’s relationship, considering the thin line the play draws between fiction and lying.Part 2 brings us to Acts 3–4, where we see how Iago stages scenes to convince Othello that Desdemona is unfaithful. Explore how Shakespeare transformed his sources in creating his character and the play as a whole.Understand the historical contexts for Shakespeare’s representations of Othello.Assess the way storytelling is associated with witchcraft, lying, and other subversive behavior, setting up the tragedy of Othello and Desdemona’s relationship.Analyze Othello’s monologue in Act 1, Scene 3 and use it as a lens through which to view the play as a whole.In Part 1, we read Acts 1–2, considering the ways in which Othello represents himself to Desdemona and to the Venetian Senate through fantastic tales.īy the end of this unit, you will be able to: Looking at adaptations of the play from the nineteenth century to the present, evaluate Othello as a platform for conversations about race, gender, class, and nationality.Use primary sources, including sixteenth-century accounts of Africa and nineteenth- and twentieth-century performance artifacts, to evaluate the play in multiple historical contexts.

Develop a critical stance on Othello and its protagonist, the “Moor of Venice,” through the central motif of storytelling.By focusing on storytelling, we can see how the play grapples with larger issues including power, identity, and the boundary between fact and fiction.įrom lectures filmed on-location in Venice and conversations with artists, academics, and librarians at Harvard, students will have unprecedented access to a range of resources for 'unlocking' Shakespeare's classic play. We'll consider, too, how actors, directors, composers, and other artists tell stories through Othello in performance. We'll look at the ways in which Shakespeare's characters tell stories within the play––about themselves, to themselves, and to each other.

Rather, it is to find a single point of entry to help us think about the play as a whole. The goal of the course is not to cover everything that has been written on Othello. In this course, we'll read William Shakespeare’s Othello and discuss the play from a variety of perspectives.