We will begin this course by examining some foundational treatments of revenge in classical and biblical contexts, move to the "Renaissance" (or re-birth) of revenge tragedy in Elizabethan and Jacobean England, and close with some modern and postmodern approaches to revenge in literature, philosophy, cinema and politics. As we explore forms of revenge transmitted in poetry, prose, verse drama, and film, we will consider how revenge both shapes, and is shaped, by particular forms of aesthetic mediation.

We will examine revenge as a form of performance and repetition, as a mode of historical representation, and as a genre preoccupied with possibilities of inflicting and articulating various forms of hurt. Works to be studied include Ovid's Metamorphoses (selections), Seneca's Thyestes, Kyd's The Spanish Tragedy, Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus and Hamlet, Webster's The Duchess of Malfi, Tourneur/Middleton's The Revenger's Tragedy, and Ford's Tis Pity She's A Whore, as well as works by Nietzsche, Freud, Poe, Plath, Pynchon, and films directed by Coppola (The Godfather II), Nola (Memento), and Greenaway (The Cook the Thief his Wife and her Lover). There will be weekly reflection papers, designed to foster a range of analytic approaches to drama, prose, poetry and film, a midterm paper and a final paper.