Title: “Hyped Beyond Belief”: Shakespeare’s Sonnets in the Twenty-First Century

Keynote speaker: Chelsie Malyszek (Visiting Assistant Professor at Hampden-Sydney College)

Time：at 8：00p.m. on Sep. 23rd  

ZOOM：2573998249 (password：D##U55)

Organizer：School of Foreign Studies

Speaker’s introduction: Chelsie Malyszek is Visiting Assistant Professor of English at Hampden-Sydney College. She earned her PhD from Yale University in 2020. Her research focuses on how American and British poets from 1915 to the present have turned to word choice, rather than conventions such as the line and stanza, to make their texts recognizably “poetic.” Her other research interests include philology, style manuals, and dictionaries. Her recent work has appeared in The Threepenny Review and The Los Angeles Review of Books.

Introduction to the lecture: This lecture investigates how twenty-first-century American poets respond to the authority William Shakespeare exerts over the sonnet form. With special attention to how contemporary poets Jen Bervin and Harryette Mullen isolate and extend Shakespearean sonnet tropes, this lecture aims to demonstrate that twenty-first-century adaptations of Shakespeare constitute a continuation of his poetics, not just a break from him. Tracking the sonnet’s enduring popularity beyond the Renaissance and into the twenty-first century provides a new critical lens with which to view the potential advantages of such a traditional, restrictive form.