Description:
Schools and universities are fast becoming managerial 'courts' of learning in which educators and students are system creatures busily fulfilling system protocols. Any teacher or academic yearning for fresh and authentic approaches to their discipline must first find ways to imagine possibilities beyond the system's limits.
This book sounds the depths of the problem in respect to Literary Studies and proposes strategies for effecting voluntary 'exile' from court in pursuit of more imaginative approaches to the teaching and learning of Shakespeare and Marlowe.Brief description: Liam E. Semler is Professor of Early Modern Literature at the University of Sydney, Australia, and has been a visiting fellow at Corpus Christi College Cambridge and the Universities of Massachusetts, Nottingham, Warwick and Essex. He leads the Better Strangers project which hosts the Shakespeare Reloaded website. He is author of Teaching Shakespeare and Marlowe: Learning versus the System (2013) and The English Mannerist Poets and the Visual Arts (1998), and editor of The Early Modern Grotesque: English Sources and Documents 1500-1700 (2019) and Eliza's Babes; Or The Virgin's Offering (1652): A Critical Edition (2001).
Review Quotes:
"This is a short book, but it is extremely rich ... The book's strength lies in combining a personal and reasonable exhortation to an urgent revision of what 'learning' can be with a refusal to simplify the issue into merely a matter of resistance." --Parergon, Journal of the Australian and New Zealand Association for Medieval and Early Modern Studies
"A welcome and iconoclastic guide to liberating approaches to the two playwrights in the classroom." --Roland Greene, Stanford University, Recent Studies in Tudor and Stuart Drama