Troilus and Cressida: "Public"ations

In my last post, I talked about The Shakespeare Institute Review. I contacted the journal to find out if they accept undergraduate work (on their website they only mentioned that they accept postgraduate work). I told them about our class and told them we were looking for places to submit our work. I also asked them what topics they prefer to publish. I haven't heard back from them yet, but I'm hoping to hear back soon! One caveat of the journal is that they publish works in British English, which may make submitting to them somewhat difficult, but I'm sure there are only a few items that would need to be tweaked in order to conform to those standards. 

They also accept submissions between 1500 and 3000 words. They just had a submission deadline for the journal, and from what I could gather, they seem to be interested in a specific theme for each journal, but they seem to want a multi-faceted view on that topic. They like seeing historical views, views connected to modern-day interpretations, views on how Shakespeare relates to psychology, politics, religion, and so forth. So if their target theme is something that connects with what you are writing, I am sure they would be interested in it. As I read through one of the older journals, I found that the submissions were very textual. Just another reason to work on our close analysis of a text as we work on our drafts.

Like several others in the class, I've also had my eye on Criterion for awhile. I submitted an article last year to them and was rejected. I'm not surprised, as they probably receive many submissions from talented writers both from within BYU and from other schools. However, a little research into what makes a typical Criterion article can't hurt our chances as we prepare to submit our papers to them. In looking over the most recent edition, I see articles that are sophisticated and complex. Many of them include a variety of terms that I've never heard of myself. Most articles seem to focus on larger contexts and themes, connecting a work to a broader context with limited textual reference. Of course, this is a fairly broad qualification, but it was interesting to note that Criterion had much less textual analysis than the Shakespeare Institute Review. However, this difference didn't make the Criterion articles any more simplistic; rather, authors were constantly connecting the themes of the novel to bigger, more universal concepts and themes in a way that made their arguments seem more complex and sophisticated.

I plan to keep these two publications in mind as I work more extensively on my draft.

I took a trip to the library and checked out around ten books. I decided I needed to beef up my critical knowledge.

So far, I am still reading a lot of the works, but here's a few things I've found:

Rhetorical Readings, Dark Comedies, and Shakespeare's Problem Plays by Ira Clark has given me a view into Troilus and Cressida as a dark comedy--a view of the play that I hadn't really considered before. I've been trying to go at the angle of tragedy turned anti-tragedy, but Clark points out the subtle and not-so-subtle irony and wit that is present in the play. I think I'll take a deeper look at this in my analysis.

There's a lot of other critical research I'm doing, but I won't bore you all with that here!

I got some feedback from my former English teacher Margaret Young. She shared with me some resources that her husband, Bruce Young, uses in his classes. There are some interesting theories as to why we as readers read tragedies, why we respond to them, and what they really are. This information can help me as I analyze what Shakespeare was trying to accomplish with his "anti-tragedy."

So far, I am pleased at the research I have been able to do. Now it's time to get down to writing!