next »

[daniel_von_flanagan]

For Coleridge's poetry, you could use Douglas Adams' Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency..

FWIW, Coleridge did one of the classic translations of the Euripides play op cit.

He also learned mathematics from William Wales, best known as the ship astronomer appointed by the Board of Longitude to the second circumnavigation voyage of Captain Cook.  Coleridge famously set Proposition 1 of Book I of Euclid's Elements into poetry.  (I don't have a link to an unexpurgated online version; people tend to publish a shorter version omitting an anti-Muslim screed involving bedwetting.)  (You can't make this stuff up.) - DvF

[firecracker]

How about some Shakespeare? There's David Wroblewski's The Story of Edgar Sawtelle (and Hamlet) and Jane Smiley's Thousand Acres (pair with King Lear).

[arizona]

Emma Donoghue also has a set of updated fairy tales called Kissing the Witch. These are feminist reworkings of the classic stories, aimed at YA readers, so they would be very accessible to a class of freshpeeps.

Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and Iris Murdoch's The Green Knight.

Romeo and Juliet and West Side Story.

If you're looking to include a film, what about Clueless and Jane Austen's Emma?

My other suggestions--Great Expectations/Mr. Pip; Hamlet/Edgar Sawtelle; and Lear/A Thousand Acres--have already been made.

[francishamit]

Jane Smiley has another book based on a classic.  "Ten Days in the Hills" based on The Decameron. 

[brixton]

If you're willing to venture into theatre, check out Irish playwright Marina Carr's "By the Bog of the Cats" with Medea OR "On Raftery's Hill" or "Ariel" with the Oresteia, specifically Euripides "Iphigenia at Aulis."  "Morning Becomes Electra" (O'Neil) might work with that group too.

[erictho]

Stephen Fry's The Star's Tennis Balls is an updated retelling of The Count of Monte Cristo.

[cj405]

I don't know if you are still looking for suggestions, but The Double Bind by Chris Bohjalian uses The Great Gatsby in a really interesting way.  It isn't based on it in the same way that most of the other examples are, but it plays an important role (trying not to give anything away here).

[betty_p]

Voice of Experience here: Don't ever use Wicked in a class. I tried once. I'll never again underestimate the ability of my students to differentiate between quality and not-so-much.

Speaking of not-so-much, Suzan-Lori Parks' Getting Mother's Body responds to Faulkner's As I Lay Dying. I'm not recommending it as a text to teach, necessarily, but it is kind of fun to read. Of course, Morrison responds to Faulkner better in just about everything she writes.