How does sexuality manifest itself through poetic form? What are the conceptual relationships between the character, the letter, and the orifice as components at once of the poetic text and of the sexual reality of the unconscious? How do the gaze and the voice as objects of the drive endemic to the artistic object take a poetic form singular to the poet? What is the relation between the rhetorical and the erotic? The course will address these and related questions through an encounter with Shakespeare's major poetic output – The Sonnets, A Lover's Complaint, The Rape of Lucrece – from a formal, rhetorical-linguistic and psychoanalytical (Freudian and Lacanian) perspective, as a key to Shakespeare's poetics at large. The course may be taken as the Shakespare requirement.

Requirements: short assignments in the course of the semester. midterm and final papers.