EA 190 Shakespeare and Japan: Course Objectives

One objective of the course is for you to think about how literary texts are “translated” from one language, cultural context, and media to another, using two plays by William Shakespeare (Macbeth and King Lear) and two films by Kurosawa Akira (Throne of Blood and Ran) as a case study.  In order to think productively about this problem, you will need to develop your critical analysis skills, and in every class we will be considering what a particular text/film/image meant in its original context and what it means to us today.  For two class projects you will do a comparative analysis demonstrating how Kurosawa “translates” Shakespeare’s themes and/or verbal imagery into the visual medium of film. The other main objective of this course is to support you to do your own research to answer the questions raised by your critical analysis of a text or film.  To that end, your final project will be an annotated bibliography on a research topic loosely related to the problem of translation.