PAD Colloquium: "Podding with Hamlet"

“Podding with Hamlet” is drawn from a chapter of Iyengar’s book “Shakespeare and Adaptation Theory”. The chapter as a whole uses Hamlet to investigate the fantasy that, given the right technology, we can access Shakespeare with what techs call “lossless transfer” – in other words, the idea, rife within popular and scientific contexts although scorned by anyone with a smattering of literary history, that Shakespeare is raw information that can be transferred from one medium to another without distortion or loss. Iyengar suggests that this fantasy has survived in part because it’s conceptually congruent with the fundamental “conduit” metaphor identified by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson in their germinal Metaphors We Live By. Lakoff and Johnson describe the concept underlying this metaphor as “content travels to the experiencer” and “content is contained in the stimulus,” and for everyday uses of this framing metaphor; think of the business-speak that calls for a “pipeline of ideas;” political calls for Joe Manchin to serve as a “bridge” between warring factions in the Senate; or even the Christian hymn attributed to St. Francis of Assisi, “Make me a channel of your peace.” In this talk she’ll briefly demonstrate various media theories by discussing two Hamlet media objects (an NFT artwork and a feature film) before considering how audio Shakespeares such as radio broadcasts work differently when remediated as streaming or on-demand content such as podcasts, especially in the post-internet era and during the time of COVID-19.

Sujata Iyengar, PhD, is Professor of English Literature at the University of Georgia, where she has taught since 1998. She is author of Shades of Difference: Mythologies of Skin Color and Race in Early Modern England, Shakespeare’s Medical Language, and many articles on Shakespeare, adaptation theory, feminist art, race studies, and theatre history. She is currently working on two books, Shakespeare and Adaptation Theory, under contract to Arden Bloomsbury, and Shakespeare and the Art of the Book, a consideration of Shakespearean artists’ books that argues that what she calls “bookness” or capabilities specific to printed or electronic books can make books into critical, aesthetic, and dramatic interventions or adaptations of Shakespeare. Recent publications include “Source/Adaptation” in Shakespeare/Text, ed. Claire M.L. Bourne (Arden Bloomsbury, 2021) and “Race Thinking in Margaret Cavendish’s Drama” (Criticism 63.1-2 [2021]).

This colloquium is Free and Open to the public. Register for this event here.

For more information on this event please visit https://pad.wustl.edu/events/