The Logic of Inequality: Caliban's Baseness in <i>The Tempest</i>

Decoursey, Matthew William

doi:10.7227/ce.64.1.6

Cited by 4 publications

(2 citation statements)

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“…“Among the broad changes in Shakespearean criticism of the last thirty years, none is starker than the shift in views of The Tempest. Where idealist readings were once hegemonic, it is now impossible to teach the play without some discussion of colonialism,” (DeCoursey, , para. 1).…”

Section: Taking the Testmentioning

confidence: 99%

Complicating canons: a critical literacy challenge to common core assessment

Peel

2017

Literacy

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The widespread adoption of the Common Core State Standards in the US has prioritized rigorous reading of complex texts. The emphasis on text complexity has led to instructional and assessment materials that constrain critical literacy practices by emphasizing quantitative features of text, such as sentence length, and a static list of text exemplars over the critical lens of the reader. Assessments like the PARCC, designed to align with nationalized standards, create the impression that complex texts are synonymous with a homogenized literary canon. A critical analysis of the texts and questions included in the first administration of the PARCC assessment reveals that the PARCC excludes both diverse authors and critical, rigorous reading practices. Research demonstrates that many literary curricula and classroom activities are strongly influenced by standardized tests; therefore, I argue for a definition of rigorous reading that supports critical literacy pedagogy and opposes the narrowing definitions of rigor and complexity that are asserted by the Common Core and PARCC.

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Section: Taking the Testmentioning

confidence: 99%

Complicating canons: a critical literacy challenge to common core assessment

Peel

2017

Literacy

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“…8 Among the most influential works on the origins of the postcolonial reading are Fiedler 1972, Greenblatt 1976, Brown 1985and Barker & Hulme 1985 To these, many other more recent readings with new details can be added, among which the most important are Wylie 2000, DeCoursey 2003, Singh & Shahani 2010, Borlik 2013and Lahiri 2015. Especially original was a contribution by J.…”

Section: "This Rough Magic I Here Abjure"mentioning

confidence: 99%

The Ideas of Power, Slavery and Freedom in Shakespeare’s 'The Tempest': A Political Re-Reading Based on His Characters’ Tendencies

Salas-Lleal

2020

ODISEA

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Power, slavery, freedom are three words that define some insistently frequent semantic fields in William Shakespeare’s The Tempest. These are very large figures: an extraordinary frequency, which is obviously not coincidental. This article aims to show that these three semantic fields define the three main pillars that enable a re-reading of the characters in The Tempest based on the analysis of the life positions of each of them, and ultimately in light of contemporary political thought.

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Khoury¹

2006

jem

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This paper is concerned with how Aimé Césaire in Une tempête d'après de Shakespeare proceeds along the colonizer/colonized lines of Shakespeare's composition. The difference between the two playwrights, however, is that Shakespeare was problematizing the colonizer/colonized relationship for his strictly English (i.e. colonizer) audience, while Césaire was writing for both the colonizers and the colonized. And though there are differences in the way the playwrights thought out the problem of master-slave relations, there is a striking similarity in how they expounded this relationship of Magician-Duke and Monster-Slave. Only the slave who desires freedom resists the master. It is this very relationship of resistance that must be discussed. Because Césaire was unabashedly Hegelian in his thinking, and because Shakespeare's understanding of the master/slave relationship was Hegelian avant la lettre, the study takes a Hegelian line of thought as its core, specifically Alexandre Kojève's Introduction to the Reading of Hegel (most notably, chapter 1). Central to this reading is the fact that in order to become free the slave must engage the master in mortal combat. But having the slave die would symbolize the perpetual oppression and death of all colonized peoples, and so neither author allows Caliban to die. In order to highlight today's postcolonial reality, Césaire extends this theme further: by not killing Caliban, and by remaining on the island, Prospero admits that his own being is defined by the Other, his slave.

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The Logic of Inequality: Caliban's Baseness in The Tempest

Cited by 4 publications

References 2 publications

Complicating canons: a critical literacy challenge to common core assessment

Complicating canons: a critical literacy challenge to common core assessment

The Ideas of Power, Slavery and Freedom in Shakespeare’s 'The Tempest': A Political Re-Reading Based on His Characters’ Tendencies

The Tempest Revisited in Martinique: AimÃ© CÃ©saire's Shakespeare

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