Fall 2024
October 24, 2024, 6pm CST
“How Plays Teach Us to See”
Location: Blount Auditorium, Buckman Hall
Visitors: to receive a parking pass, please register here.
Adhaar Desai (Bard College), “Fair is Foul, and Foul is Fair”
Abstract: This talk explores how Macbeth dramatizes a crisis in the operations of judgment, in how individuals distinguish between real and illusory, good and bad, beautiful and ugly. Tracing this crisis to how Renaissance educational practices attempted to cultivate ethical statesmen by training them in rhetorical style, I’ll propose that Macbeth anticipates reflections on the continuities between aesthetic and moral judgments by modern philosophers like Iris Murdoch, Stanley Cavell, and Alexander Nehamas. It was obvious to Shakespeare and his contemporaries that writing well did not correspond to behaving well, but in Macbeth he demonstrates that freely deliberating upon the “good,” whether it be a poetical word or political deed, always risks rationally making the wrong choice.
Wendy Beth Hyman (Oberlin College), “Theater as Portal”
Abstract: “Mine eyes are made fools of the other senses / Or else are Worth all the rest.” So says Macbeth, reeling, as he tries to clutch a floating dagger that his murderous thoughts have conjured. Is it physically there before him, or a psychological projection, “a dagger of the mind”? This is partly a question for directors, but it is also an epistemological question. How do we know what we know, and is the ocular sense an asset or hindrance to that knowledge? In the early seventeenth century, early modern optical technologies like the telescope, camera obscura, and (soon enough) the microscope promised newfound access to the invisible and the faraway. In this talk I argue that Shakespeare’s “Globe,” too, was an ingenious technology of perception, offering glimpses of supernatural realms that natural philosophy (or science) increasingly rejected. At the same time, plays like Macbeth deliberately ambiguate the relationship between the visible and intelligible, foregrounding the contingency of human perception and understanding.
On October 25, Professors Desai and Hyman will also be holding a pedagogy workshop entitled for faculty members.
Speaker Bios:
Adhaar Noor Desai is Associate Professor of English at Bard College, NY and co-founder of the Experimental Humanities Collaborative Network. He is the author of Blotted Lines: Early Modern English Literature and the Poetics of Discomposition (Cornell, 2023).
Wendy Beth Hyman is Donald R Longman Professor of English and Comparative Literature and Chair of Book Studies at Oberlin College, OH. She is Trustee of the Shakespeare Association of America and author of Impossible Desire and the Limits of Knowledge in Renaissance Poetry (Oxford, 2019).
Spring 2025
Feb. 24 – March 5: Residency with visiting artist Nick Hutchison.
Hutchison is a director, actor, and lecturer. His work covers television, film, theatre, voice-over, and radio, working for the BBC, ITV, the Royal Shakespeare Company, the Royal National Theatre, and Shakespeare’s Globe.
As with past residencies, he is available for class visits and workshops.