ENL 5227 Hand Fall 2022

In the introduction to Arts for Living on a Damaged Planet, the volume’s editors write, “The winds of the Anthropocene carry ghosts—the vestiges and signs of past ways of life still charged in the present. This book offers stories of those winds as they blow over haunted landscapes. Our ghosts are the traces of more-than-human histories through which ecologies are made and unmade.”

This course reads the haunted landscapes of early modern England, the nonhuman beings that populated them, and the occult practices and influences by which humans shaped and were shaped by their environment. With accompanying readings in animal studies, ecocriticism, ecofeminism, queer ecology, and posthumanism, we will study early modern literature to locate the “invisible technologies of nature’s marvels,” occult knowledge and practices, gendered situated knowledges, and nonhuman agentive beings and influences whose presence defined early modern lived experience. Primary texts may include (but are not limited to) witchcraft narratives, natural histories, herbals, books of receipts, and plays such as Doctor Faustus, Macbeth, The Witch, The Winter’s Tale, The Witch of Edmonton, The Late Lancashire Witches, and A Maske at Ludlow Castle.

In addition to regular discussion posts and a presentation, students will identify a call for papers or site of publication and produce a piece of original scholarship which may be presented as a conference paper or developed into a publishable article.