St. Norbert Times

Issue date: 11/23/09 Section: News

Media Credit: Kelsey Fenton

Dr. Edward L. Risden, professor of English, recently presented a lecture for the attendees of a luncheon as part of the Women's Enrichment Series. Risden, sporting a tweed jacket, captivated the women in the audience as he gave his lecture entitled "Shakespeare's Women and the Sounds of Silence."

Risden, who prepared the talk specifically for the Women's Enrichment Series, actually wrote his lecture with the intention of including it in a future piece of work, "an ongoing project on Shakespeare."

"I'm ultimately working toward a book, and this will be a chapter," he said.

When Risden writes anything, be it lecture or scholarly analysis, he tries to think of what more he might do with the piece. Could it be incorporated into an article for publication in an academic journal? Or, perhaps organized into a chapter for a book?

Risden admits: "Writing is hard! It takes a lot of energy!"

Risden teaches one of the major author courses required for English majors on Shakespeare's Drama. He encourages student writers not to think of pieces one writes as assignments, but as something you now have the opportunity to write about. If students wish to engage themselves more fully in their writing, he insists that we cannot just think they are simply "writing a silly assignment for a silly professor."

Unlike his Shakespeare class, this audience did not have a reading assignment ahead of time. However, Risden still wanted to give his lecture some depth so it did not seem like "fluff."

He said: "It was something that would be interesting I hope, but also accessible."

After spending years closely examining Shakespeare's drama, Risden was able to point out that one often finds wise and important women characters who are silenced during the play. While they are sometimes silenced by another character, they sometimes silence themselves.

Risden asked himself: "When we find these women silenced, why does that happen?"

The title of his lecture, "The Sounds of Silence," was borrowed from the Simon and Garfunkel song of the same name. The song expresses the troubling idea that silence is dangerous because it means that people who have things to say do not have the opportunity to say them. Risden discovered that the same thing occurs in Shakespearian drama.

Continued...

Page 1 of 2 next >

Article Tools