Seminar No. 1.6.

Title: Shakespeare from the 21st-century Left: Or, Material Shakespeare for the New Millennium.

Leaders:

John Drakakis (Stirling University, Scotland)
Hugh Grady (Beaver College, USA)

Participants:

Denise Albanese (George Mason University)
Barbara Correll (Cornell University)
Mustapha Fahmi (University of Quebec, Chicoutimi)
Evelyn Gajowski (University of Nevada, Las Vegas)
Edward Gieskes (University of South Carolina)
Kim Hall (Georgetown University)
Terence Hawkes (Cardiff University)
Don Hedrick (Kansas State University)
Robert Weimann (University of California, Irvine)

Abstract:

For Karl Marx and for generations of critics of capitalism, the works of Shakespeare have served as sources for and
allegories of social and political critique. The very same texts have been deployed in the service of a variety of political,
and humanitarian causes. With the challenge to established leftist discourses on the subject of Shakespeare, and at the
point of entering a new century, we invite papers exploring the relevance to the study of Shakespeare of emerging
critiques of contemporary world capitalism from a number of perspectives. The 1980s saw the emergence of leftist political criticism of Shakespeare as a major component of contemporary Shakespeare studies via feminism, cultural materialism, versions of Marxism, psychoanalytic criticism and the new historicism, and this trend has evolved but continued throughout the 1990s. Furthermore, the presence at a World Conference of representatives of many nationalities, each with a unique leftist tradition, promises further to enrich the discussion.