Course Description:
This seminar will focus on early modern literature (from roughly the 1590s to the 1640s), with an emphasis on Shakespeare; we also will be reading current theoretical and historical works about the Anthropocene. There are two big goals for this course: one is to examine how seemingly contemporary conversations regarding environmental disaster, sustainability, and the future utilize ideas, metaphors, and modes of thinking that emerge in early modern English culture; and the second is to consider how early modern habits of thought might influence our own, aiding in conceptualizing alternative forms of habitation and cultivation of the earth.
I break the course into three different sections that ultimately will overlap: a section on “earth,” another on “water,” and a final one on “air” so as to capture different elements of the ecosystem. In the process, we will cover a range of genres like comedy, tragedy, and tragicomedy/romance. Students will learn how to think about, and with, the quotidian aspects of these parts of the ecosystem, enabling us to ask and answer questions like: What is the forest doing in As You Like It? Why do forests move in Macbeth? What about the rough seas in The Tempest? What is the meaning of the ocean in Pericles? Why is Antony allied with the sky and clouds in Antony and Cleopatra? We will read Shakespeare’s works alongside selected poems by contemporaries that allow us to deepen our understanding of the meanings of different elements of the ecosystem and the socio-political contests over those elements, ranging from the problem of land use for economic development to perceptions of the air as filled with communicative spirits, an element dense with messages, some interpretable, some inscrutable.
We also will read recursively throughout this course, so, for instance, when reading Antony and Cleopatra we will return to our reading of The Tempest because of Ariel’s status as a creature of the air and their pivotal status in educating Prospero; or when analyzing King Lear, we can think about land as property and the meaning of the storm, moving between the earth and the air as elements, and this, in part, will return us to As You Like It and Macbeth, given their interest in representing land and forests. Throughout, we will attend to key writings in ecocriticism, cultivating a vocabulary for eco-critical cultural analysis that will inform our literary analyses and our thinking about the past and present.
Readings:
Earth
Shakespeare. As You Like It. (c. 1599) Juliet Dusinberre, ed. Arden ShakespeareEdition: 2006.
Ben Jonson, “The Forest” and “To Penhurst” (1616) (PDF)
Shakespeare. Macbeth. (1606) Sandra Clark and Pamela Mason, eds. Arden Shakespeare Edition: 2015.
Water
Shakespeare, The Tempest. (1610-11) Virginia Mason Vaughan and Alden T. Vaughan, eds. Arden Shakespeare Edition, 2011.
John Donne “The Calm” and “The Storm” (1604) (PDF)
Michael Drayton “Ode: To the Virginian Voyage” (1606) (PDF)
Shakespeare. Pericles. (c. 1609), Suzanne Gossett, ed. Arden Shakespeare Edition: 2004.
Air
Shakespeare, Antony and Cleopatra. (1609) John Wilders, ed. Arden Shakespeare Edition: 1995.
Amelia Lanyer, “The Description of Cookham” (1611) (PDF)
Shakespeare. King Lear. (c. 1608) R. A Foakes, ed. Arden Shakespeare Edition: 1997.
Assignments
10% Participate
15% Gathering Assignment: A Google Doc Dictionary of terms from class texts for the study of the Anthropocene, past and present. Everyone must offer three terms/phrases and their definitions, one from our literary texts and two from criticism, over the course of the term.
20% Pollinate Assignment: a 5-minute presentation on one of the secondary readings due for any given day and everyone does two of these presentations over the course of the term. A review of the core argument and terminology as well as a question the argument generates.
20% Cultivate Assignment: Using a list of early modern books on ecology that I will provide, students will pick one, describe it, and present on a short portion of it that they read. No one will have to read whole texts, so much as they will narrate its contents and some of its ideas in a short, 3-to-4-minute presentation and a short write-up (500 – 700 words)
35% Harvest Assignment: a final paper assignment on one or more of the texts (3,000 words)
Student Learning Outcomes:
In this course, students will:
- Gain a rich understanding of early modern English culture via a focus on the works of Shakespeare and his peers
- Grasp the distinctive socio-cultural impact of early modern theater as an institution
- Improve one’s knowledge of different methods for interpreting texts, especially eco-criticism as it intersects with historicism, Marxism, queer/trans theories, and critical race theories
- Strengthen one’s skills in historicizing texts and objects
- Better one’s capacity in crafting a paper, especially in handling an array of primary and secondary sources to make an argument
- Conduct oral presentations that effectively convey arguments to an