Seminar No. 3.3.

Title:  Re-framing Othello: Contexts, Para-texts, and Critical New Directions.

Leaders:

Michael Neill (University of Auckland, New Zealand)
Edward Pechter (Concordia University, Canada)

Participants:

Linda Anderson (Virginia Tech University)
Malvina Aparicio (Universidad Católica Argentina and the Universidad del Salvador)
Crystal L. Bartolovich (Syracuse University)
Shaul Bassi (University of Venice)
Joanna Byles (University of Cyprus)
Lawrence Danson (Princeton University)
Dave Golz (University of Nevada)
Rafat Karim (University of Karachi and Shakespeare Association Pakistan)
Natasha Korda (Wesleyan University)
Thomas Moisan (St. Louis University)
Joseph A. Porter (Duke University)
Christopher Pye (Williams College)
Michael W. Shurgot (South Puget Sound Community College)
Steve Sohmer (Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, UCLA)
Mark Sokolyansky (University of Odessa)

Abstract:

Othello, a play set in the Mediterranean, has a special contemporary appeal, as evidenced not merely by the amount of
critical attention recently lavished upon it, but by the way in which its narrative has been reworked by a remarkable range
of contemporary novelists and playwrights from Tayeb Salih and Murray Carlin to Salman Rushdie and Caryl Phillips --
not to mention the authors of the musical 'Catch My Soul'. Yet the historicist bent of much current criticism has also
reminded us that, as the artefact of a culture very different from our own, Othello’s concerns are bound to be remote
from, if not discontinuous with, current concerns. This seminar invites submissions addressed to either of these apparently
contradictory kinds of interest, or to the special problems associated with their convergence.