Henry S. Turner
research, publications, teachingSummer 2012
On June 7-8, I’ll be visiting the Mellon School of Theater and Performance Research at Harvard University, giving a lecture on “Shakespeare and Company: Theatricality, Corporations, Political Philosophy” and leading a discussion of Shakespeare’s Coriolanus and the idea of the State as a fiction. This year’s theme for the School is “Theater, Theory, Philosophy,” with two-week seminars by Bernadette Meyler (Cornell) on “Theater and Democracy” and by H. Martin Puchner (Harvard) on “Theater and Philosophy: From Plato to Badiou.” Other guest faculty include Tracy C. Davis (Northwestern), David Greenspan (New York), David Herskovits (Target Margin Theater), David Kornhaber (UT-Austin), Donna Kornhaber (UT-Austin), David J. Levin (Chicago), Freddie Rokem (Tel Aviv), Andrew Sofer (Boston College), and Dieter Thomä (St. Gallen).
I just returned from the marvelous “Renaissance Posthumanism” conference at Rice University, organized by Joseph Campana (English, Rice) and Scott Maisano (English, U-Mass, Boston). From their blurb (and consider the utterly uncanny image):
“Renaissance Posthumanism explores the connections between the cultures of early modern Europe and current work in the post humanities. The project will culminate in a symposium followed by an edited collection that will bring together scholars of national and international renown to address the intersection of early modern literary, cultural, and historical studies and notions of the human as viewed through the lens of recent work referred to under the rubric of “the posthuman.” Did Renaissance humanism in fact produce the vision of the human against which much post humanism militates? How might emerging theories of “the posthumanities,” which tend to emphasize highly contemporary forms of media and technology with little reference to their longer histories, benefit from incorporating the tangle of humans, animals, environment, and machines that comprises Renaissance humanism?”
In addition to opening and closing papers by Scott (on materialism, Lucretius, and The Tempest) and Joe (on “charismatic metafauna” and the cascading failures of the “human” across the mirrors of Hamlet and Lacan), we heard papers from Laurie Shannon (English, Northwestern) on animal happiness and human depravity; Kenneth Gouwens (History, U-Conn) on European humanism and confusions in post humanist theory; Vin Nardizzi (English, UBC) on the woodenness of failed actors; Diane Wolfthal (Art History, Rice) on pictorial illustration of the mandrake; Stephen Campbell (Art History, Johns Hopkins) on Titian’s terrifying “Flaying of Marsyus”; Henry Turner (English, Rutgers) on thinking and fiction in Bacon’s “post humanist” philosophy of Nature; Judith Roof (English, Rice) on boxes, frames, and “ordure” in Rabelais; Holly Dugan (English, George Washington) on ape-men and sexual violence in medieval romance; Erica Fudge (English, Strathclyde) on cattle and chattel, “quick goods” and “livestock” in 16th and 17th century England; Julian Yates (English, Delaware) on sheep, otium, and the post human archive of early modern England; and a fascinating roundtable discussion on “Hive, Swarm, Fly” by Cary Wolfe (English, Rice), Derek Woods (English, Rice), Donna Beth Ellard (English, Rice, ACLS Fellow), and John Ellis-Etchison (English, Rice).
Keep your eyes out for the forthcoming collection of essays…
The English Renaissance Stage: Geometry, Poetics and the Practical Spatial Arts (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006) is now in paperback. Read a description of the book with excerpts from reviews.
