Our Norton Tempest has only a slice of Robert Browning’s great poem, “Caliban upon Setebos.” The rest can be found at this link, and it’s very much worth reading.
Derek Owens on Composition and Sustainability
I’m looking forward to reading your short papers, which should start rolling into my email inbox any hour now. As we all get ready for our next meeting, on Oct 19, here’s a link to our special guest Derek Owens’s 2001 book, *Composition and Sustainability*. The whole text is online. Read as much as you like, but at least the preface plus the first & last chapters. (That’s a good model for dipping into a scholarly book, btw — first chapter, then the last, then see what you need from the middle.)
“Let us spurn earthly things”
We’ll likely spend most of our time tomorrow night on 20c responses to The Tempest, esp Cesaire’s and some of the other modern critics. (Lamming seems to have aroused some interest already.) But I wanted to put a word in early for the little snippets of source text that precede those essays, inc Pico’s “Oration,” from which the title of this post comes.
These snippets are hard to read (esp the shorter ones), and sometimes hard to follow (esp when excerpted), but they repay the effort. Pico’s phrase might help us think about the philosophical basis for Prospero’s treatment of Caliban (whom he calls “thou earth” in 1.2), and more broadly about intellectual aspiration and what it does in this play.
For any who are wanting to work on post-colonial readings, too, I strongly suggest looking closely at Samuel Purchas (93-5), who gives a succinct summary of the reasons Englishmen felt justified in colonizing the New World.
Maritime Quarters
Guam (found at Starbuck’s in the Baltimore Hyatt during the Maritime Heritage Conference last week) went to Olivia. Northern Marianas Islands (found this morning at St. John’s) to Ian.
The wages of coffee…
Thalassological Readings
For my grad class for next week’s reading, here are pdf versions of two articles that give you a pretty good idea of my recent work in maritime ecocriticism. When I get back from this conference, I’ll post a little bit more background, but in case you want to get started reading, here they are.
Toward a Blue Cultural Studies
Note: I’m having some trouble with the first link. I’ll try to repair it but might not get to that until tomorrow (Fri). You can also find that article in the journal *Shakespeare*.
Seems to work now! Let me know if you have any problems.
Maritime Heritage Conference
Symposium on the Semiotics of Shipwreck
This should be a great event at the National Maritime Museum in London in November.
http://www.nmm.ac.uk/researchers/conferences-and-seminars/shipwreck-symposium
Classrooms in the Cloud
That’s not my title (though I like it) — it’s a new series of lunch-time talks at St. John’s for experiments in technology and teaching. I’ll be first off the mark next Tuesday, Sept 14, to talk about my Blue Humanities Blog (which I’m starting to think should be renamed the Bookfish). All St. Johnnies welcome, though you’ll need to bring your own lunch. Hosted by Jennifer Travis of the English Dept and Elizabeth Alexander of Online Learning & Services.
September 14, 2010 – Bent Hall, Room 277 (12-1pm)
The Storm
About four years ago, when I was in the rare books library at Mystic Seaport making some notes that eventually turned into At the Bottom of Shakespeare’s Ocean, I wanted to write the entire book on The Tempest. And, really, to be even more extreme, I wanted to write the whole thing about the first scene.
I’ve never seen the storm scene done well on stage (it was the low point of the great Bridge Project Tempest last year at BAM, and also of the engaging RSC production with Patrick Stewart I saw in London a few years ago). As I read it, the scene exposes the chaos and disruption at the play’s core. “We split,” say the wet mariners, and at this moment — before the magus & his emotive daughter & the air spirit & etc arrive to explain & clarify & order everything — disorder rules the stage. In production that have Prospero on the stage in 1.1 — as he was in the Sam Mendes/Bridge version, as in many others — it short-circuits the scene. We shouldn’t have anyone visible to trust.
So many choices — I wrote about the Boatswain’s technical maritime language (“yar!”) in Shakespeare’s Ocean, and I’ve read good explanations of the scene’s anti-monarchism (“What cares these roarers for the name of king?”). Alonso’s plea for theatrical authority (“Where’s the master?”), Antonio’s rough individualism (“Hang, cur, hang”), and Gonzalo’s weepy plea for “long heath, brown furze” all amount to different efforts to wring chaos into order.
But there’s a brief moment here, before Miranda & Prospero come on stage, when it’s not clear that any order is forthcoming. That’s the wrack really does wreck everything. That that play really investigates the meaning of being “lost at sea” (to borrow a phrase). That’s what I don’t think anyone has managed to capture on stage.
I wonder what it would be like to try to stage it underwater.
New York Public Library: registration
All my E. 110 students should visit www.nypl.org before our class trip on 10/5. Spend a little time on the site to see what it has to offer your project, and also go ahead and register online for a library card. You’ll be able to pick it up at the circulation desk when we are there in early October.
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