Winter 2014

PROGRAM DATES

The program will take place during the winter of 2014 and will roughly correspond to the Carleton term.

DIRECTOR

Pierre Hecker, Assistant Professor of English
Pierre teaches Shakespeare; the drama, poetry, and prose of the English Renaissance; and film. He earned his MFA from Columbia and D.Phil from the University of Oxford.

PREREQUISITES

There are no prerequisites. The seminar is open to students of any major at Carleton. Participants are urged, prior to the start of the program, to take any 100-level English course and to be possessed of an inordinate enthusiasm for theatergoing and great cultural open-mindedness.

OVERVIEW

Literature, theater, and the arts flourish in London. The city has an incomparably rich literary and cultural past and present and is arguably the world’s pre-eminent city for theater. The goal of the London program is to provide Carleton students with an immersive experience in this rich milieu, with a focus on the life and times of Elizabethan and Jacobean England, encompassing literature, theater, art, music, architecture, geography, and history. The capstone project for all the courses will be the collaborative creation of a modern version of a 16th century commonplace book.

LEARNING GOALS

  • To learn about the historical and aesthetic interrelations of the literature, art, and architecture of Tudor and Stuart England through observation, writing, experience, and original artistic production
  • To gain new trans-historical and cross-disciplinary perspectives on the English Renaissance
  • To help students challenge their own literary, aesthetic, and personal values
  • To expand students’ curiosity and ways of thinking through exposure to new ideas, environments, and another culture
  • To deepen students’ appreciation and understanding of all aspects of theater
  • To engage in a grand thought experiment to imagine and absorb the world of the English Renaissance 

If you have immediate questions about courses, please email Pierre Hecker, phecker@carleton.edu. Other questions may be addressed to the Off-Campus Studies Office, x4332.