It also strikes me that, revolving around the pivot-paragraph in Calhoun, the remaining essays in the Forum lead with the present tense, as it were. I sympathize with Sharon’s voice here, and I too am concerned about the relationship between early modern ecostudies and the historicist mainstream.
The present is too important to ‘not act’ or do nothing.
…he present is too important to be left to theorists. At the end, though, she flags a present-tense imperative:įor this reason I again urge my historicist early modern colleagues to engage this ecological and political movement - fully. Sharon O’Dair, a champion of the present, playfully intersperses famous passages with textbook definitions of “ecology” and descriptions of the BP oil spill on coastal Alabama. Does that move automatically make this essay presentist? Or - as I’d prefer - does Calhoun’s brief & stylish collapsing of time past and time present in readerly experience enable him to side-step the anachronism police? “Plants still provide us with paper,” he writes a bit later, “and by extension, with Shakespeare.” It’s a clever hook, connecting the material form in which we often read and teach these poems with their own poetic obsessions with time and decay. “Like the things it depicts,” Calhoun writes, “the cover must disintegrate” (64). Some of these essays, esp the first three by Jean Feerick, Mary Floyd-Wilson, and Vin Nardizzi, work to unpack particular historical meanings that have been obscured by later history, as in Feerick’s “human indistinction” from nature, Floyd-Wilson’s “vibrant inorganic matters,” or Nardizzi’s richly polyvalent “wood.” A shift toward “very now” comes with Joshua Calhoun’s rather brilliant opening description of the cover of his paperback edition of Shakespeare’s Sonnets. As usual in early modern studies, the flash points cluster around history. The referent is tellingly obscure, like Latour’s Parliment of Things, but I take it to represent the sub-field itself, early modern eco-studies, a quasi-object inventing itself over distributed space in the reasonably pace of academic time. There may be telephone calls, Skype connections, chat rooms, or whatever it takes to render this or that entity present.
#Sharon o dair free
The two editors, Garrett Sullivan and Julian Yates, gave the eight of us contributors free rein to engage the terms as we wished, though their introductory nods toward Latour’s “quasi-objects” and Michel Serre s set a tone:Īll of us… engaged in an inquiry into a general physis or general theory of metaphor, clustered around a quasi-object that we are making. I’ve been thinking about the “Shakespeare and Ecology” forum in the recent Shakespeare Studies XXXIX, and the state of play in this sub-field.
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