Steve Mentz

THE BOOKFISH

THALASSOLOGY, SHAKESPEARE, AND SWIMMING

  • Home
  • Steve Mentz
  • Humanities Commons
  • Public Writing
  • The sea! the sea!
  • The Bookfish
  • St. Johns

Practicing the Future of Shakespeare Studies (Columbia, March 7)

March 8, 2014 by Steve Mentz Leave a Comment

We gobbled up the feast of futurity at the Columbia Faculty House yesterday, thanks to the inspired organizational labors of Zoltan Marcus and Ashley Streeter, and the provocative papers of, from morning til afternoon, Mario Di Gangi, Zach Lesser, Alan Stewart, Margaret Litvin, Jean Howard, Ayanna Thompson, W. B. Worthen, and Adam Zucker. Ancillary commentary provided by session chairs, which were Andras Kisery, me, Naomi Leibler, and Tanya Pollard. Plus an amazingly large and engaged audience for a long Friday of talking and thinking!

At day’s end we were all asked to pronounce final thoughts on the future as we see it, in under two minutes. Here’s what I said, ventriloquizing everything I’d heard into a common voice —

These are some things Shakespeareans like (taken out of order):

1. eccentricity

2. shifting scales

3. “partial” historicism

4. dialectical historicism

5. “unfixed” things

6. Databases

7. Digital Humanities

8. disidentification

9. mediated authorship

10. communities of practice

11. co-writing

12. porous skins

13. the “social”

14. postprint Shakespeare

15. remediation

16. France

17. the word “niddicocke”

18. jokes we can’t quite understand

Plus a shorter list of things we don’t like:

1. passive consumption of social science

2. naive empiricism (though empiricism as such is OK)

3. anecdotalism

4. single authorship

5. Prospero-to-Caliban models of influence

6. evolutionary psychology (mostly)

7. small, homogenous sample sizes

8. textual transcendentalism

9. “perfect mastery”

And one big thing about which opinions are mixed, qualified, and otherwise in flux —

1. Historicism (!)

I especially like that, in my unreliable summary, the future contains twice as many things to like as to dislike. The overwhelming spirit of the event, tangible to me even through the nasty head cold I was fighting all day, was of generosity: if not quite, O brave new future!, than at least with real curiosity and without any desire to trammel up the consequence and skip past any of the narratives beginning to unfold.

I was somewhat struck by the relative absence of some of my own hobby (sea-)horses, especially ecocritical and “new materialist” modes (some of which I’ll talk about on Wednesday at Hofstra), though Mario did start us off with a smart quick engagement with Jane Bennet via affect theory.

No single day or small group of speakers can predict the future, of course, and throwing darts at Shakespeare’s moving image may be a fool’s errand. But the erudition, wit, sympathy, and passion displayed yesterday made me quite optimistic about the next 450 years of Shakespeare studies.

 

Filed Under: Uncategorized

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

About Steve

Steve Mentz
Professor of English
St. John’s University
Read Bio

Twitter Feed

Steve Mentz Follow

Shakespearean. Ecocritic. Swimmer. New book Ocean #objectsobjects Professor at St. John's in NYC. #bluehumanities #pluralizetheanthropocene

stevermentz
stevermentz Steve Mentz @stevermentz ·
20 Jan

Send us your book proposals!

Reply on Twitter 1616466877257220096 Retweet on Twitter 1616466877257220096 Like on Twitter 1616466877257220096 7 Twitter 1616466877257220096
stevermentz Steve Mentz @stevermentz ·
31 Dec

Much to remember in '22, including a fantastic fall in Germany at the @CarsonCenter. But especially one day in late October, while isolating with Covid in a rural farmhouse in Bavaria, when I saw my first all-creative publication, these little poems --

http://www.ghostbirdpress.org/2022/10/swim-poems-by-steve-mentz.html

Reply on Twitter 1609321380100669440 Retweet on Twitter 1609321380100669440 1 Like on Twitter 1609321380100669440 14 Twitter 1609321380100669440
Load More

Pages

  • #shax2022 s31: Rethinking the Early Modern Literary Caribbbean
  • OCEAN Publicity
  • #SAA 2020: Watery Thinking
  • Creating Nature: May 2019 at the Folger
  • Audio and Video Recordings
  • Oceanic New York
  • Public Writing
  • Published Work
  • #pluralizetheanthropocene

Recent Posts

  • RCC Calendar Oct – Dec 2022
  • Books of ’22!
  • The Blue Humanities Goes to Venice!
  • Blue Humanities in Bremen
  • Blue Humanities at the Greenhouse (Stavanger)

Copyright © 2023 · News Pro Theme on Genesis Framework · WordPress · Log in