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Evaluate why Othello provides continuing material for engaging issues surrounding race, gender, class, colonialism, and other topics.Encounter American Moor, a new play that dramatizes a black actor’s experience auditioning to play Othello.Consider how genre becomes a tool for rewriting Othello from a female perspective.Weigh divergent feminist responses to Othello by Toni Morrison, Djanet Sears, Paula Vogel, and Ann-Marie MacDonald.In Part 4, we continue our study of Othello's afterlives with Toni Morrison's Desdemona and Keith Hamilton Cobb's American Moor. Consider how adaptations bring new meaning to old texts through setting, language, medium, and other artistic choices.Explore music as a means for telling Othello’s “story,” including representing gender, nationality, and race.Discover Otello in the Seraglio, which transposes the play to the Ottoman court, revising the “orientalism” of both the play and its operas.Delve into the history of operatic adaptations of Othello, beginning with the nineteenth-century Italian composers Verdi and Rossini.Part 3 introduces us to Giuseppe Verdi's Otello and Mehmet Ali Sanlikol's Othello in the Seraglio. Discover how two famous African-American actors, among the first black actors to play Othello, interpreted the play and leveraged it for their own activism.Evaluate the multiple meanings available in the play’s variant versions and their implications for performance.Use Othello’s monologue in Act 4 to interpret the handkerchief, one of the play’s most central props/symbols.Compare and contrast Othello’s storytelling with Iago’s machinations to sabotage Othello and Desdemona’s relationship, considering the thin line the play draws between fiction and lying.


Part 2 brings us to Acts 3–4, where we see how Iago stages scenes to convince Othello that Desdemona is unfaithful. Explore how Shakespeare transformed his sources in creating his character and the play as a whole.Understand the historical contexts for Shakespeare’s representations of Othello.Assess the way storytelling is associated with witchcraft, lying, and other subversive behavior, setting up the tragedy of Othello and Desdemona’s relationship.Analyze Othello’s monologue in Act 1, Scene 3 and use it as a lens through which to view the play as a whole.Afghanistan, Albania, Algeria, American Samoa, Andorra, Angola, Anguilla, Argentina, Armenia, Azerbaijan Republic, Belarus, Benin, Bhutan, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Botswana, Brazil, British Virgin Islands, Burkina Faso, Burundi, Cameroon, Cape Verde Islands, Central African Republic, Chad, Comoros, Congo, Democratic Republic of the, Congo, Republic of the, Cook Islands, Côte d'Ivoire (Ivory Coast), Djibouti, Ecuador, Equatorial Guinea, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Falkland Islands (Islas Malvinas), Fiji, French Polynesia, Gabon Republic, Gambia, Georgia, Ghana, Guam, Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, Guyana, Haiti, India, Iraq, Kazakhstan, Kenya, Kiribati, Kyrgyzstan, Laos, Lebanon, Lesotho, Liberia, Libya, Macedonia, Madagascar, Malawi, Mali, Marshall Islands, Mauritania, Mauritius, Mayotte, Micronesia, Moldova, Mongolia, Montenegro, Morocco, Mozambique, Namibia, Nauru, Nepal, Netherlands Antilles, New Caledonia, Niger, Nigeria, Niue, Palau, Papua New Guinea, Peru, Puerto Rico, Russian Federation, Rwanda, Saint Helena, Saint Pierre and Miquelon, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, San Marino, Senegal, Serbia, Seychelles, Sierra Leone, Solomon Islands, Somalia, Suriname, Svalbard and Jan Mayen, Swaziland, Tajikistan, Tanzania, Togo, Tonga, Tunisia, Turkey, Turkmenistan, Tuvalu, Uganda, Ukraine, Uzbekistan, Vanuatu, Venezuela, Vietnam, Virgin Islands (U.S.In Part 1, we read Acts 1–2, considering the ways in which Othello represents himself to Desdemona and to the Venetian Senate through fantastic tales.īy the end of this unit, you will be able to:
