How might one design or adapt a course to make it more responsibly global? How might we teach important texts, long disappeared into the morass of the “canon,” in such a way that highlights their inherent globality and renders them new?
The Rise of Silas Lapham is a somewhat underexamined work among scholars of collecting and thing theory. The story’s aspirational emphasis makes for a highly effective exploration of material subjectivity and class politics, and the things in Lapham’s life reveal an emerging consumer economy within the Gilded Age. These textual elements signify the cultural labor of constructing an upper-class affect, likewise inviting readers to consider their own curatorial habits.
The treatment of the military subject in Shakespeare’s Roman plays complicates early modern cultural understandings of the material aspects of militant nostalgia. Shakespeare inherits a partial and objectified Roman military figure linked to trophies and armor, and this figure negotiates the early modern English playgoer's relationship to his glorious, unattainable Roman past.
Stanford Humanities Center
