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Humanities 110

Thesis Students

English Department


Curriculum Vitae

Reginald F. Arragon


Reed Home Page

I've been at Reed College since 1974, where I teach a variety of courses in the English department, and normally teach in Humanities 110, which is required for all first-year students. Each year I usually offer one course on Shakespeare, sometimes in the context of other Elizabethan and Jacobean dramatists, sometimes by himself, and sometimes with an emphasis on text and performance. I often teach one version of the junior seminar in English. Each year I also offer either a course addressing topics in literary theory or a course addressing questions about gender, literary history, and literary representation.

I work mainly on early modern literature, especially Shakespeare, trying to practice my own version of what Stanley Cavell calls "philosophical criticism," but with a strong historicist inflection. I have one book out of print, Shakespeare: The Theater and the Book (Princeton, 1989), and am trying to finish another, tentatively entitled Circe's Rod: Shakespeare and the Disciplines of Culture. During a fellowship period at the Folger Shakespeare Library, I developed (partly under the tutelage of J. W. Binns) a secondary interest in neo-Latin literature, which has resulted in an essay on John Case's Thesaurus Oeconomiae, and a couple of short entries in handbooks.

If anyone is interested in the larger story, see my curriculum vitae.