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Daniel Vitkus, University of California, San Diego
'Impossible Matter': Humanity, Agency, and Identity in 'The Tempest'
Cartography Seminar, Mahindra Humanities Center
Shakespeare’s late comedy The Tempest (1611) offers an intensive exploration of nature/culture boundaries and hierarchies in an enchanted world where magic mediates between spirit and matter. As such, it is a fitting text for assessing the ethical and political efficacy of the “new materialist” approach, and for testing the strengths and limits of that critical turn.
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Shakespeare’s late comedy The Tempest (1611) offers an intensive exploration of nature/culture boundaries and hierarchies in an enchanted world where magic mediates between spirit and matter. As such, it is a fitting text for assessing the ethical and political efficacy of the “new materialist” approach, and for testing the strengths and limits of that critical turn. Taking The Tempest as a case in point, the paper will explore some of the theoretical possibilities and political limitations of the new materialism for our practice in the human sciences. Understanding humanity, not as a species apart, but rather as penetrated by and entangled with non-human “vital matter” is surely part of a needed critique of anthropocentrism, but how far should we go in deemphasizing and decentering human agency?
Daniel Vitkus is Professor of English and the Rebeca Hickel Chair in Elizabethan Literature in the English Department at the University of California, San Diego. He is the author, among others, of Turning Turk: English Theater and the Multicultural Mediterranean, 1570-1630, a critical edition of Shakespeare's Othello, and numerous articles. He earned his Master's Degree in English Language and Literature at Oxford University (Hertford College) and his Ph.D. in English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. His interests include Shakespeare, Renaissance literature, travel writing, cultural studies, literary theory, postcolonial literature, Islamic culture and its representation in the West, economic history, global theory, the origins of capitalism, and the cultural history of empire.