ENGL 81500 Sympathetic Bodies and Ecosystem on Early Modern Stages
Tanya Pollard
The Graduate Center, CUNY
Spring 2019, Thursday 11:45-1:45
This course will explore early modern ecosystemic thought, with attention to the period’s theories about sympathies between human, animal, botanical, and mineral bodies. We will explore these imagined relationships through attention to their intellectual origins and development, and examine the possibilities they modeled in early modern plays for generating animation and eliciting audience sympathies. Readings will include selections from Thomas Elyot, The Castel of Helth (1539); Thomas Wright, The Passions of the Mind in General (1604), John Davies, Microcosmos (1605); and Helkiah Crooke, Microcosmographia(1615); as well as plays including Thomas Kyd, The Spanish Tragedy (15787); Arden of Faversham (1592); William Shakespeare, Titus Andronicus (c.1592), Midsummer Night’s Dream (c.1595), As You Like It (c. 1597), Macbeth (c.1606), The Tempest (c.1611); Ben Jonson, The Alchemist (1610); and John Webster, The Duchess of Malfi (1612-13). Assignments will include three short close readings and one research paper.
