Reflections
Reflections on Literary Analysis
All Metropolis's a Stage
The purpose of this piece was to analyze a scene from one of Shakespeare's plays by imagining how I would present the characters on stage or screen. I chose a scene from the second act of As You Like It, because of the fluidity of gender roles in that particular play and reimagined the work using DC Comics' Superman cast, casting Lois Lane as Orlando and Superman/Clark Kent as Rosalind/Ganymede. Since As You Like It isn't the most well known of plays (albeit not completely obscure), I thought it might be best to reimagine it using characters with which most of the western world—especially Americans—are familiar.
Given the assignments constrants, I could not surpass a particular page length, so in the future, were I to revisit this piece, I'd put the Shakespearean text beside my imagined Superman text and show how the the characters of Superman and Lois do fit almost perfectly into their roles as Rosalind and Orlando. I may also turn this into a pitch for DC Comics at a later date, if I am able to get a hold of a cartoonist who could create for me a 3-5 page spread.
This paper was presented at the Fourth Annual AddRan Festival for Undergraduate Scholarship and Creativity.
The Purpose of Ophelia's Madness
The final project for my "Issues in Shakespeare" class required each student to take either a character of device from a play we had read over the semester and analyze its use. After researching Ophelia, I found that many scholars wrote her off as nothing more than an advancer of the plot and serving no greater purpose in the Bard's magnum opus. Being both offended and astonished, I researched madness in the Renaissance and emphasized the importance of Hamlet's relationship with Ophelia and the contrast between his "antic disposition" and her true madness.