Come hear a four-hundred year old tragedy speak to twenty-first century environmental catastrophe! The storm-poetry will rage at low tide at Dead Horse Bay’s Glass Bottle Beach on Sept 19 at 5:30 pm!
Join me and the students in my Open King Lear grad seminar to walk this amazing beach, the site of a nineteenth-century landfill and horse rendering plant, with Professor Craig Dionne, author most recently of Posthuman Lear: Reading Shakespeare in the Anthropocene (Punctum Books, 2015).
We’ll look and listen to sounds of long-ago and still ongoing disasters, talk about how human bodies encounter hostile environments, and explore the boundaries of literary representation and ecological understanding. Professor Dionne will speak about how King Lear reimagines language and humanity in and after catastrophe.
Praise the world to the angel (Rilke)
We’ll also be joined by St. John’s Professor Elizabeth Albert and the editors of underwaternewyork.com, who have recently collaborated on the gorgeous volume Silent Beaches, Untold Stories, which explores the forgotten history and artistic present of New York’s waterways.
Reason not the need! (Lear)
All are welcome! We’ll meet in the parking lot at Floyd Bennet Field / 50 Aviator Road and together walk the 15 min trail out to the beach.
Please contact Steve Mentz (mentzs@stjohns.edu) if you’d like to join us!
Glass Bottle Beach
Sounds good – though rather too far to travel. Just seen the RSC’s King Lear with Antony Sher. Still digesting it, but the first half and especially the opening scene was tremendous.
I hope I can see that production at some point — though I won’t be back in Stratford until next summer at least!