QUESTIONS QUESTIONS QUESTIONS QUESTIONS

From the Cultural Approaches course

· How would it change my reading of this text if I attempted to situate it in its context and thought about what cultural, social, political, or historical knowledge its readers would have brought to it?

· Does understanding the social location of its readers or writer (their gender, race, class, sexual orientation etc.) change my reading of the text?

· Is this text engaged in cultural or ideological work? Is it attempting to discipline its reader or provoke him/her to resistance or critique?

· What discourses that were circulating in the culture at the moment of its production are also operating in the text? Where else do I see these discourses working?

From the Intertextuality Approaches course

• How does the later text shift the focus or emphases of the previous text? Which aspects become erased, suppressed, undercut? What new elements are added?
• Does the later text revise the earlier one in order to answer a contemporary question in the culture or in the life of the writer?

From the Biographical Approaches course.

• How can we use letters, interviews, notebooks, or drafts to tell the story of the changing aesthetic interests in this writer's career?
• How do letters, interviews, notebooks or drafts help us to tell the story of this writer's relationship to another writer?
• How do letters, interviews, notebooks or drafts provide new categories of analysis or new ways of looking at this literary text?
• How do letters, interviews, notebooks, drafts or biographies give me access to the (usually multiple) meanings that a writer made out of a life event? How can I use these biographical materials to help me watch the writer struggle with figuring out the meaning of his own life?

From the Literature and Performance approaches course

· How is a film a text just like a play or a poem or a novel? How can it be analyzed critically?

· What are some of the terms in the critical/analytical vocabulary of film study?

· How do Shakespeare's plays lend themselves to interpretation in the medium of film?

· How do two different film versions of the same Shakespeare play show differing interpretations of that play by the filmmakers?

· How do you read a screenplay critically, and especially how do you see in a screenplay the filmmaker's interpretation of the play?

From the interart relations approaches course: Word & Image

· How does our understanding of the poetic strategies in ekphrastic poems change and/or deepen once we’ve seen the paintings that they reference?

· How do similarities and differences in individual ekphrastic approaches illuminate these authors’ projects and the varied field of ekphrastic texts?

· How does Benjamin change how we read visual culture and ekphrastic literature?

· What is gained and lost in ekphrastic transformation? For the visual art? For the poem? Is this plagiarism? Is it traitorous?