Schedule / Horaire
Wednesday 23 April 2014, 11h-13h.
Room: V106B.
Leader / Organisatrice
Malvina Isabel Aparicio (Argentina)
Participants
- Sharon O’Dair, University of Alabama Tuscaloosa (USA)
“Water’s Violent Love” - Anna Kowalcze-Pawlik, Jagiellonian University (Poland)
“Map of Woe”: The Topography of Female Body in Titus Andronicus - Joseph Campana, Rice University (USA)
The Bee and the Sovereign: Segments, Swarms, and the Early Modern Multitude in Coriolanus - Viktoriia Marinesko, Classic Private University, Zaporizhzhia (Ukraine)
“The Something that Nature Gave Me”: the Role of Nature in Shaping the Genius through the Prism of Shakespeare’s Biographies - Malvina Aparicio, Argentine Catholic University / University of the Salvador (Argentina)
The Non-Human as a Character in Macbeth - Simon C. Estok, Sungkyunkwan University (South Korea)
Ecocriticism and Timon of Athens - David Morrow, College of Saint Rose (USA)
Shakespeare before the Metabolic Rift: Land, Labor and Ecocriticism - Doyle Ott, Sonoma State University (USA)
Putting a Tempest in a Teapot: Physicalizing the Storm in Shakespearean Performance
Abstracts / Résumés
1. Sharon O’Dair, University of Alabama Tuscaloosa (USA)
“Water’s Violent Love”
In her afterword to “Ecomaterialism,” a cluster of essays in Postmedieval (2013), Jane Bennett urges us to engage vibrant matter’s potential threats to human life, its violence. Too often, ecocritics celebrate the agency of non-human matter; yet today the powers of earth, air, fire, and water threaten and injure human populations more strongly and randomly than ever. I touched on this topic in my contribution to the cluster in Postmedieval, entitled “Water Love,” and for this seminar I want to make explicit the violent love of Shakespeare’s tempests.
2. Anna Kowalcze-Pawlik, Jagiellonian University (Poland)
“Map of Woe”: The Topography of Female Body in Titus Andronicus
This paper discusses the definition of the forest as a space regulated by the repetitive act of appropriation on the part of the royal authority as well as the correspondences between the rhetoric of forest possession and the codification of another locus communis for the political use of nature, i.e. female body. Spatialization/naturalization of the female body in Titus Andronicus offers three interlocking imaginary topographies: 1. a “feminized” topography of Rome as the lady, 2. that of the forest as a whore, and 3. the “politicized” topographies of female bodies of Lavinia and Tamora that oscillate between the two.
3. Joseph Campana, Rice University (USA)
The Bee and the Sovereign: Segments, Swarms, and the Early Modern Multitude in Coriolanus
Were humans the only political creatures in early modernity? Clearly not, answers a wave of work in animal studies. Yet to which forms of non-human life do we attend? How might we think about early modern polities with help from what Thomas Moffett referred as Lesser Living Creatures? Here I argue with reference to Coriolanus that questions of sovereignty, so beneficially impacted by a wave of work on animality, might be significantly sharpened through attention to a wider range of non-human forms of life, particularly insects, and the segments and swarms impact what constitutes a body politic and political collectivity.
4. Viktoriia Marinesko, Classic Private University, Zaporizhzhia (Ukraine)
“The Something that Nature Gave Me”: the Role of Nature in Shaping the Genius through the Prism of Shakespeare’s Biographies
Shakespearean scholars see nature in the Bard’s works not as something ornamental, but as an important object of literary presentation which fulfils a “narrative function.” Shakespeare’s biographers are “following the verbal traces he left behind back into the life he lived and into the world to which he was so open” (Greenblatt). Among those traces nature is one of the most distinct. The aim of this paper will be to investigate the way in which different sub-genres of biographies view the concept of nature in Shakespeare’s works, and employ it in their fictional model of reality as a cognitive tool.
5. Malvina Aparicio, Argentine Catholic University / University of the Salvador (Argentina)
The Non-Human as a Character in Macbeth
By borrowing ecological concepts like ‘adaptation’ ‘mimicry’ ‘e/in/volution’ for the treatment of the Wëird Sisters in Macbeth, they can be viewed in an ‘earthly’ way, devoid of supernatural connotations which can be left to idiosyncratic perceptions of time, place and culture. They may cease to operate as ‘symbols’ of evil, the ‘witches’, and simply ‘be’ natural creatures undergoing a process of decay as the result of their toxic habitat, the northern lands, around Shakespeare’s time (1606). The experience ‘in the heath’ could be read then in symmetrical opposition to King Lear: rather than affording a ‘moment of clarity’ it would bring sheer confusion.
6. Simon C. Estok, Sungkyunkwan University (South Korea)
Ecocriticism and Timon of Athens
Studying Timon of Athens from an ecocritical perspective, I will argue for the necessity of queering green and greening queer early modern scholarship, with an eye to recognizing the central ity of ecophobia in much of what is going on in Timon. This play goes out of its way to queer Timon, perhaps to defamiliarize his relationships so that his excesses and impacts are more clearly visible. Timon has much to say to our students about: the social and environmental limits of consumption; meat and vegetables; the unsustainability of the hierarchies we imagine and live by; and about delusions of grandeur.
7. David Morrow, College of Saint Rose (USA)
Shakespeare before the Metabolic Rift: Land, Labor and Ecocriticism
If Shakespearean ecocriticism is to be activist, and if doing such work includes “opening up radical challenges in the plays” (Estok), then Marxist conceptions of labor, class struggle, and primitive accumulation offer it promising (if underutilized) interpretive categories. Through the lens of agrarian conflict, this paper analyses the dramatic and ideological functions of representations of rural commoners and social relations on the land in several tragicomic romances. It also aims to suggest ways in which Marxist ecocriticism might allow us to reconsider Shakespearean drama in light of our own era’s escalating conflicts over land and food.
8. Doyle Ott, Sonoma State University (USA)
Putting a Tempest in a Teapot: Physicalizing the Storm in Shakespearean Performance
This paper examines the evolving use of the human performer to evoke the fury of the storms that so often drive Shakespeare’s plots. Some productions evoke these forces with the aid of scenography and sound, while others use extended physical performance tech niques to evoke the storm. How might these corporeally realized weather events carry meaning differently than storms created through more standard stage technologies? Build ing on recent ecocritical investigations, I examine Shakespeare’s storms as performative phenomena created by human bodies on the stage.