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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.