Arras

Convenors : Guillaume Winter (Université d’Artois), Vincent Roger (Institut Catholique de Lille), Julie Assouly (Université d’Artois).

Symposium organized by Textes & Cultures (Université d’Artois, EA 4028) and Laboratoire Pluridisciplinaire des Sciences de l’Homme et de la Société (Institut Catholique de Lille), under the aegis of the Société Française Shakespeare.

Keynote speakers:

Prof. Sarah Hatchuel (Université du Havre) and Prof. Nathalie Vienne-Guerrin (Université Paul-Valéry, Montpellier)

Prof. Douglas Lanier (University of New Hampshire)

Four hundred years after his death, Shakespeare is more alive than ever. In a globalized marketplace, his works reach new audiences every day through online media that have become innovative places of creation and adaptation (O’Neill, Shakespeare and Youtube). The Bard has long since been the object of illustrations and transpositions, but it seems that the appropriation of his poems and plays by popular culture has taken a new turn over the last forty years, from cameo appearances of characters and famous lines to full rewritings or parodies for a pop-culture-conscious audience (Doescher, William Shakespeare’s Star Wars). The man behind the plays has left the world of Bardolatry once associated with ‘high’ culture to become a pop icon, transfigured into a hip character with his own Twitter and Facebook accounts. But just how relevant are contemporary popular adaptations and avatars to the reception and interpretation of the poet? Do they contribute to a new understanding of Shakespeare, or do they merely testify to the ever-growing commodification of his works, and of the writer as a public persona? With the new millennium came fresh appraisals of Shakespeare’s place in our modern age (Burt ed., Shakespeare after Mass Media). This conference will be the opportunity to question the validity of Shakespeare as a popular commodity and the status of the texts in recent adaptations and transpositions.