English and Comparative Literature
Undergraduate Seminar
M 12:10-2PM
Our current environmental crisis has fractured familiar narratives about the relationship between humanity and the natural world. To begin reimagining this relationship, this seminar will turn back the clock to the Renaissance and the birth of the English theater industry, where Shakespeare and his contemporaries were still attempting to understand what counts as “nature” within the confines of the playhouse. This seminar will not only complicate our modern distinction between nature and culture, but it will also trace the many ways that environmental crisis materialized both on and off stage in the early modern period.
This seminar will also engage with current scholarship in ecocriticism – a growing critical field that investigates the representational problems posed by our current environmental crisis. We will also consider how the theater, due to its generic variety, its embodied form, and its material dependencies, might be uniquely positioned to model living within and reckoning with environmental crisis or change.
Link to Vergil
Note: only courses offered during the two previous semesters have active Vergil links.
