Freie Universität Berlin, Institut für Englische Philologie

Habelschwerdter Allee 45, D-14195 Berlin

Univ.-Prof. Dr. Manfred Pfister i.R.

Habelschwerdter Allee 45

D-14195 Berlin


              Telefon  +49 30 / 838 72318

                     Fax  +49 30 / 838 72335

                E-Mail  mpfister@zedat.fu-berlin.de

              Internet  www.fu-berlin.de


                              Berlin, 10  October 2012




Fachbereich Philosophie und

Geisteswissenschaften

Institut für Englische Philologie










Dear lovers of intermedial Shakespeares,


thank you for wishing to join our workshop or compact seminar – call it what you like, but not a
series of monological lectures - on ‘Shakespeare Intermedial’. I am looking forward to share our
insights into The Sonnets and Romeo and Juliet and explore together the various dimensions of the
intermediality, both the ‘internal’ intermediality which is part of their aesthetic structures, and
their ’external’ intermedial history of floating between genres and media. We shall not depart from
a pre-given theory of intermediality (therefore I do not set any specific theoretical texts for
preliminary reading) but will work out theories of intermediality, its types and function, as we go
along.


Please find attached the program of our seminar which tells you for each session what you should
study carefully beforehand from day to day – apart from, of course, having read the entire play and
a selection of the sonnets before our seminar begins coming Tuesday. At our first meeting, we shall
study the intermedial relations between the sonnet cycle and the love tragedy, and for that you
should study the sonnet prologue of Romeo and Juliet and its ballroom scene act I, scene iv. The
following seminar sessions of the first week will then be dedicated to the sonnets, those of the
second to the play. And, please, do not forget to bring both texts along with you to each class –
in English, as I sadly have no Czeck, or in bilingual editions. .

Being concerned with intermedial circulations of these texts, we will have to view together film,
opera, ballet and musical versions of them. As this would take up all the time of our seminar
meetings, I suggest a ‘fringe program’ (see the program attached) outside class, for which we shall
have to find a time and place – and someone who can help me with the technicalities of projecting
audio-visual materials. This will be one of the first things to settle when we meet for the first
time on Tuesday, 16 October, in room G 03.

I am looking forward to meeting you all; should you have any questions before that, do not hesitate
to send me a mail (manfred.pfister@fu-berlin.de).

All the best,

Manfred Pfister



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