Re-Creating the Classics
F05, F06
Marguerite Feitlowitz
“Why read the classics?” Italo Calvino famously asked. What does it mean to be “contemporary”? Why is it that our meditations on, and debates with, these landmark works never seem to be “settled”? Why is it that some of our most deeply experimental, politically combative, and visionary writers continually find inspiration in canonical works? In our exploration of these questions we will read a series of classic works with their radical re-creations: Sophocles’ Antigone/Griselda Gambaro’s Antigona Furiosa; The Travels of Marco Polo/Calvino’s Invisible Cities; The Tempest/Auden’s The Sea and the Mirror; Robinson Crusoe/Coetzee’s Foe; Jane Eyre/Jean Rhys’ Wide Sargasso Sea. We will also consider the ways in which fresh waves of scholarship and new translations may effectively re-create works we thought we “knew.”