Text, Image, Sound - Ophelia's Afterlives: Cultural Representations from Shakespeare to Taylor Swift

CLLC L110 / Class 30273 — Spring 2027

Location
Edmondson Hall C112
Days and Times
Tu/Th 11:10a.m.-12:25 p.m., 3 credits
Course Description

Ophelia’s fate was sealed in 1601, with the completion of Hamlet, but in popular culture, she seems immortal. She shows up everywhere, from the John Everett Millais painting that Taylor Swift alluded to in her album artwork for The Life of a Showgirl, to a story from 1800s Spain where she comes back from the dead for vengeance, to a seemingly endless number of songs, artworks, and texts. Ophelia is more than just a character. She has become a cultural archetype, both universal and contextually specific. In this class, we’ll work together to understand her, in all her contradictions: invisible and disruptive, pure and seductive, mad and wise beyond her years. Given that she dies offstage, why are people so obsessed with showing her dying in that stream, surrounded by flowers? How does she change across the centuries? And what is it about Ophelia that we can’t look away from?

Instructor: Rhi Johnson

Collins Seminars: Selected by Board of Educational Programming (BOEP)