ENGL 695 B1: Shakespeare and Ecological Crisis

C. Sale

At a Shakespeare conference in 2018, Australian academic Peter Holbrook demanded, in relation to the existential crisis for humanity posed by anthropogenic climate change, ‘Why aren’t we acting like we’re in a state of emergency? Why aren’t we acting like we’re at war?’ This graduate seminar asks what it is that literature may do in the face of what confronts us and what we must confront. How might select Shakespeare’s plays, written on the brink of modernity and in the midst of the historical developments in England excoriated by Marx (developments that are our inheritance) help us think about human-driven destruction of the planet’s ecological systems in a double project of critique and creativity that might harness critical and imaginative capacity for a radical transformation of humanity and human/non-human relations? How do the contemporary texts help us address the Shakespeare plays and the Shakespeare plays address us? And how might thinking about Shakespeare’s plays as prescripts for embodied practice in the time and space of playgoing assist our considerations of the forms of sociality and praxis urgently required now?

The Shakespeare plays we will take up: A Midsummer Night’s Dream, As You Like It, Hamlet, Macbeth, Coriolanus, The Tempest.

Our secondary readings will include the following (in some cases, we will read only select chapters):
Jorge Bergoglio (Pope Francis), Laudato Si’ (2015)
Amitav Ghosh, The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable (UChicago Press, 2011)
Jairus Victor Grove, Savage Ecology: War and Geopolitics at the End of the World (Duke UP, 2019)
Roger Hallam, Common Sense for the Twenty-First Century (2019)
Donna Haraway, Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene (Duke UP, 2016)
Catherine Keller, Political Theology of the Earth: Our Planetary Emergency and the Struggle for a New Public (Columbia UP, 2018)
Robin Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants (Milkweed Editions, 2013)
Bruno Latour, Down to Earth: Politics in the New Climatic Regime (Polity Books, 2018)
Andri Snaer Magnason, On Time and Water (Bibliosasis, 2021)
Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor (Harvard UP, 2011)
Alexis Shotwell, Against Purity: Living Ethically in Compromised Times (UMinnesota Press, 2016)
David Wallace Wells, The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming (Tim Duggan Books, 2019)
Tyson Yunkaporta, Sand Talk: How Indigenous Thinking Can Save the World (HarperCollins, 2020)