British Shakespeare Association Biennial Conference 2005
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Programme : Panels - Seminars - Workshops
Seminar - 'Shakespeare and ecology'
Friday 2nd September 2005, 2.00-3.30pm, Bedson Teaching Centre LG35
Participants | Call for Papers
Participants
Convenor - Kevin De
Ornellas, Queen's University
Convenor - Dr. Gabriel
Egan, Loughborough University
Peter Milward, Sophia University Tokyo
Carol Morley, Rose Bruford College
Lynne Bruckner
Niels Herold
Mustapha Fahmi, Université du Québec à
Chicoutimi
Sharon O'Dair, University of Alabama,
Simon C. Abraham-Estok, Konkuk University
convenor's website: http://www.gabrielegan.com/ecoShakespeare/index.htm
Call for Papers
Below is the original Call for Papers, as circulated. Please note that the date for submissions has passed and the successful participants are listed above.
Convenors: Kevin De Ornellas (Queen's University, Belfast) and Gabriel Egan (Loughborough University)
The most pressing social and political problem of our time, ecological degradation, has had virtually no impact upon Shakespeare studies to date. Debates about how the countryside and animals are exploited by humans are apparent in Elizabethan and Jacobean dramatic and non- dramatic writing, but, since their productive forces were not sufficiently developed to make the widescale changes that we've become capable of, it is easily but wrongly assumed that ecological concern emerged only in the last 50 years. In fact, arguments about how to define the natural in contradistinction from the human, about the proper relations of these two spheres, and the ideological and political purposes to which arguments about nature might be put have long been apparent in literature and drama, as work on the Romantics has shown.
Contributors to this seminar on 'Shakespeare and ecology' are invited to do such things as: raise questions about the representation of animals and the natural world in Shakespeare; historicize changing human relations with the natural world and how these affected the creation and reception of Shakespeare's work in his own time and across the centuries since then; put in the context of cultural theory the changing conceptions about humanity's place in the universe (including, for example, claims that an epistemic rupture separates us from Shakespeare's time); and consider how these matters might bear upon the duties of Shakespeare scholars today. This seminar will be inherently interdisciplinary--indeed it explicitly imports to Shakespeare studies concerns and methodologies from other subject areas.
Please view the website at: www.GabrielEgan.com/ecoShakespeare
Contact: Kevin De Ornellas (k.deornellas@qub.ac.uk)
and Gabriel Egan (mail@GabrielEgan.com).
