Papers by Kathrin Bethke
Shakespeare Seminar 19 Shakespeare's Odysseys, 2022
Aside from the Greek war lords of Troilus and Cressida, a play based mainly on plot elements from... more Aside from the Greek war lords of Troilus and Cressida, a play based mainly on plot elements from the Iliad, Proteus, the protagonist of The Two Gentlemen of Verona, is the only character in Shakespeare’s works that is based directly on an episode from Homer’s Odyssee (cf. 4.340–609). Shakespeare scholars usually emphasize the mutability of Proteus with regard to his amorous desires and character, thus explaining why he carries the name of the ancient shape shifter. However, in Shakespeare’s time, Proteus is also eponymous with a particular element of Renaissance poetics, namely the Proteus line that was first introduced by Julius Caesar Scaliger in his Poetices Libri Septem (1561). The proteus line is a verse whose elements can be deliberately permuted without changing the meaning of the sentence. It is thus a basic element of a combinatory poetics that Shakespeare’s play alludes to directly in its opening scene: after Julia tears into pieces a love letter from her lover Proteus, she instantly starts to permute and recombine its elements, thus creating a linguistic space in which the lovers can be ‘re-combined’ and thus reunited. Throughout this early comedy, the protean poetics of permutation and recombination determine the development of plot and characters. The connection of the play to Scaliger’s proteus line and the principles of combinatorics have never been investigated, even though they constitute an astonishingly modern element of Shakespeare’s writing that anticipates not only the experimental features of avantgarde poetry (e.g. the poetic works of Gertrude Stein or Raymond Queneau and the Oulipo group). It also resonates with aspects of James Joyce’s poetics. This paper proposes to carve out, in a first step, the different features of Shakespeare’s Proteus character and the poetic principles associated with the proteus line, and to compare them, in a second step, to the Proteus chapter of Ulysses and combinatorial elements in Joyce’s writing. It thus aims to trail a poetological trajectory that connects early modern and modernist poetics.
Book Chapters by Kathrin Bethke
Forms at Work: New Formalist Approaches in Literature, Culture, and Media, 2021
The Rhetoric of Topics and Forms, 2021
In More than Cool Reason: A Field Guide to Poetic Metaphor, George Lakoff and Mark Turner argue t... more In More than Cool Reason: A Field Guide to Poetic Metaphor, George Lakoff and Mark Turner argue that poetic metaphors are simply variations and extensions of basic conceptual metaphors that structure everyday language. Based on examples from William Shakespeare's sonnet sequence, this article reconsiders the question of poetic metaphor with a particular focus on the function of emotion metaphors in literary texts. Poetic metaphors of emotion, this study argues, can capture affective states that have no stable place in the English emotion lexicon, such as the feeling of "heaviness" described in Shakespeare's sonnet 50 or the feeling of "worthlessness" described in sonnet 87. Even though poetic metaphors may be derived from basic conceptual metaphors, they can potentially function as absolute metaphors that make historically as well as culturally remote affective states accessible to the intellect.
Conference Papers by Kathrin Bethke
Liebesgeflüster und Wutgeschrei: Affektkommunikation in Antike, Mittelalter und Früher Neuzeit (E... more Liebesgeflüster und Wutgeschrei: Affektkommunikation in Antike, Mittelalter und Früher Neuzeit (Emerging Scholars Workshop), Osnabrück, 2022.
Shakespeare's Odysseys (Shakespeare Seminar der Jahrestagung der Deutschen Shakespearegesellschaft), Bochum, 2022
Protean Poetics in Shakespeare and Joyce Aside from the Greek war lords of Troilus and Cressida, ... more Protean Poetics in Shakespeare and Joyce Aside from the Greek war lords of Troilus and Cressida, a play based mainly on plot elements from the Iliad, Proteus, the protagonist of The Two Gentlemen of Verona, is the only character in Shakespeare's works that is based directly on an episode from Homer's Odyssey (cf. 4.340-609). Shakespeare scholars usually emphasize the mutability of Proteus with regard to his amorous desires and character, thus explaining why he carries the name of the ancient shape shifter. However, in Shakespeare's time, Proteus is also eponymous with a particular element of Renaissance poetics, namely the Proteus line that was first introduced by Julius Caesar Scaliger in his Poetices Libri Septem (1561). The proteus line is a verse whose elements can be deliberately permuted without changing the meaning of the sentence. It is thus a basic element of a combinatory poetics that Shakespeare's play alludes to directly in its opening scene: after Julia tears into pieces a love letter from her lover Proteus, she instantly starts to permute and recombine its elements, thus creating a linguistic space in which the lovers can be 're-combined' and thus reunited. Throughout this early comedy, the protean poetics of permutation and recombination determine the development of plot and characters. The connection of the play to Scaliger's proteus line and the principles of combinatorics have never been investigated, even though they constitute an astonishingly modern element of Shakespeare's writing that anticipates not only the experimental features of avantgarde poetry (e.g. the poetic works of Gertrude Stein or Raymond Queneau and the Oulipo group). It also resonates with aspects of James Joyce's poetics. This paper proposes to carve out, in a first step, the different features of Shakespeare's Proteus character and the poetic principles associated with the proteus line, and to compare them, in a second step, to the Proteus chapter of Ulysses and combinatorial elements in Joyce's writing. It thus aims to trail a poetological trajectory that connects early modern and modernist poetics.
References to the practice of double-entry bookkeeping, with its two principle forms of the inven... more References to the practice of double-entry bookkeeping, with its two principle forms of the inventory and the double-entry ledger, are omnipresent in the works of Shakespeare and other early modern writers. They are not merely part of a micro-economic practice that organizes the debits and credits of estates, but they are frequently invoked by characters on their deathbed facing their final audit or final reckoning (e.g. the ghost in Hamlet and Posthumous in Cymbeline) as well as they are a recurrent motif in early modern sonnet sequences. The opening poem of Samuel Daniel's Sonnets to Delia presents the volume of poetry as an account book that 'sums' and 'reckons' the speaker's various 'cares' and 'expenses' so the beloved lady can eventually 'crosse' his emotional 'debts'. The form of the double-entry ledger is thus super-imposed on the sonnet form; the restricted literary space reserved for the limitation, organization and representation of love is joined with a mathematical system that surpasses even the sonnet in its rigidity and logicality. Caroline Levine has proposed to extend the methodological premises of formalist literary analysis to the study of social, political, and epistemological settings. This paper proposes to investigate the "affordances" and after-lives of the double-entry system, not just a form of knowledge that is absorbed into various literary forms, but as a principal form of affect control in the English Renaissance that is constantly invoked as a means of registering, calculating, and balancing people's moral as well as emotional accounts.
Hans Blumenberg and various branches of cognitive linguistics have argued that metaphors can have... more Hans Blumenberg and various branches of cognitive linguistics have argued that metaphors can have the epistemological as well as cognitive function of making abstract phenomena intelligible. That includes, of course, emotions and other affective phenomena. However, the corpus linguistic studies of scholars such as Mark Turner, Raymond Gibbs, and Zoltán Kövecses are usually based on every day language and thus suggest that basic emotion metaphors are timeless and universal. Literary texts, on the other hand, often encode a historically specific knowledge of affect by means of their figurative language. This session invites case studies that investigate the various metaphorical source domains and conceptual blends used to represent particular emotions in particular literary texts. The contributions might address the following theoretical issues: What distinguishes literary emotion metaphors from the basic metaphors we use in our every day language? How do literary emotion metaphors interact with other poetic as well as rhetorical features of the text (syntax, prosody, etc.) in order to represent emotions, moods, or atmospheres? What do literary emotion metaphors 'know' and imply about the the nature and function of emotions?
Throughout his works Shakespeare uses economic metaphors to conceptualize affective phenomena. Es... more Throughout his works Shakespeare uses economic metaphors to conceptualize affective phenomena. Especially in the comedies lovers don't burn in tragic passion; instead they itemize and calculate each other's bodies, virtues and properties according to micro-economic practices such as arithmetic and double-entry bookkeeping. Other characters use poetic "numbers" as a means to 'reckon' their love object's value: "If I could write the beauty of your eyes/ And in fresh numbers number all your graces", exclaims the speaker of the sonnets, thereby introducing a prosaic element of mathematic exactitude to the realm of love. For Longueville, poetry thus loses its traditional power to induce emotional reactions: "I fear those stubborn lines lack power to move […] These numbers I will tear, and write in prose" (LLL 4.3.50ff). This paper looks at Shakespeare's "numbers" both as a central motif of his writings and as an element of his own poetics of affect.
Courses by Kathrin Bethke
Course Description In the past fifteen years the focus of anglophone literary studies has increas... more Course Description In the past fifteen years the focus of anglophone literary studies has increasingly expanded its focus from the investigation of postcolonial literatures to a much larger corpus of transnational and/or transcultural literary texts in English that are connected mainly by thematic criteria as they often explore the effects of global migratory movements or the experiences of first-and secondgeneration immigrants living in Britain. This seminar proposes to survey texts by authors such as Kamila Shamsie, Caryl Phillips, Patience Agbabi and Adania Shibli in search for elements of a transcultural poetics that might connect contemporary diasporic writings on a poetological level. We will investigate these texts according to a variety of theoretical parameters, including intertextuality, intersectionality, multidirectional memory, the poetics of genre, and the poetics of affect. Theoretical readings will include Wolfgang Welsh, Edward Said, Michael Rothberg, and Sarah Ahmed, among others. We will also look at a variety of intertexts that our primary texts are based on, such as Sophocles's Antigone, Shakespeare's Othello, and Lady Mary Worth's Pamphilia and Amphilantus.
Course Description Even though the 19 th century is often thought of as the age of the novel, the... more Course Description Even though the 19 th century is often thought of as the age of the novel, the Victorian period has brought forth a vast variety of lyric poetry that engages with the political, scientific, and aesthetic developments of the time in surprising ways. So-called 'factory poems' comment on the life of workers in the era of the industrialization, authors such as Elizabeth Barret-Browning and Charlotte Bronte engage with British colonialism and the slave trade, and writers like Christina Rosetti and Oscar Wilde use their literary works to participate in the reconfiguration of gender roles. This course offers an overview of the history of poetry in English from the 1830s to 1890.
In his essay "Signs of th e Times" of 1829, the Scottish philosopher Thomas Carlyle characterizes... more In his essay "Signs of th e Times" of 1829, the Scottish philosopher Thomas Carlyle characterizes the early 19 th century as the "Mechanical Age" or the "Age of Machinery". His seemingly clairvoyant text is not only a commentary on the rapid advances in technology, such as the steam engine and the expansion of the railway network, but also on the detrimental effects of these advances on the political, social, moral, and emotional lives of British society. Its skeptical attitude towards science and technology predicts a variety of thematic obsessions that will pervade the literary production of the entire century. In this seminar we will study a selection of British and Scottish novellas and short stories that react to 19 th century scientific and social change, including excerpts from Charles Dickens' short novel Hard Times (1854), which explores the psychological ramifications of the industrialization, Margaret Oliphant's short story The Land of Darkness (1886) and Robert Louis Stevenson's Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886), which both echo anxieties regarding scientific advancement and experimentation, and finally H.G. Wells' science fiction story The Time Machine (1895), which portrays in a bleak and disturbingly accurate dystopian vision the possible consequences of evolution, capitalism, and climate change. We will contextualize our readings with excerpts from scientific and philosophical writings by Thomas Carlyle, Friedrich Engels, Charles Lyell, and Charles Darwin, among others. Visits to the Science and Technology galleries in the National Museum of Scotland, the Surgeon's Hall Museum as well as the Writer's Museum in Edinburgh may offer further historical context to our discussion. Students should acquire the primary texts of our seminar in the Norton Critical Edition (watch out for used copies in online thrift stores such as abebooks.de and medimops.de). It is important to purchase exactely the editions indicated since we will also be using the additional materials provided in the back of each book. All other texts and materials will be provided on Stud.IP.
"The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano" (1789) by Olaudah Equiano (or Gustavus... more "The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano" (1789) by Olaudah Equiano (or Gustavus Vassa) is a key text in the history of Black British Writing that suggests the possible role of literature in the abolition of the British slave trade in the early 19 th century. A central feature of Equiano's autofictional text is a programmatic emphasis on the narrative generation of empathy. 18 th century philosophers such as David Hume and Adam Smith celebrated the capacity for sympathy with 'our fellow-humans' as a 'moral sentiment' that could help to build ethical communities. However, scholars such as Amit S. Rai and Xine Yao have recently demonstrated the limits of sympathy discourses that cater to Western feelings of benevolence and moral superiority with little impact on internalized structures of racism and xenophobia. In this seminar, we will first analyse Equiano's strategic use of empathy scripts and then contrast his text with two contemporary re-writings, namely Caryl Phillips' "Cambridge" (1991) and Bernardine Evaristo's "Blonde Roots" (2008), which seem to challenge and problematize Equiano's poetics of affect specifically in the way they reconfigure the relationship between text and reader. Our readings will be accompanied by consultations of contemporary approaches to the affective phenomenon of empathy from disciplines as varied as philosophy, evolutionary biology, and the neurosciences, including recent developments in literary studies that focus on the concept of "narrative empathy", such as the works of Fritz Breithaupt and Suzanne Keen.
The period of the Renaissance is characterized by enormous economic changes that transformed the ... more The period of the Renaissance is characterized by enormous economic changes that transformed the stratification of English society. The development of global trade brought to the fore a number of cultural practices that also had a considerable influence on the literary production of the time. Practices related to money as a medium of exchange, such as usury, bonds, and bills of exchange, but also practices related to the cultural techniques of printing and writing, such as double-entry accounting and counterfeiting are frequent themes of early modern poetry and drama. This seminar offers an introduction to Elizabethan and Jacobean literature with a particular focus on texts that reflect on different religious, philosophical, and affective attitudes towards money and the various ways in which economic practices shape social relationships and identities. Key texts of this seminar will be Christopher Marlowe's Jew of Malta and William Shakespeare's Merchant of Venice, which focus on the early modern culture of credit, and Shakespeare's Timon of Athens, which dramatizes the economy of the gift and the psychological challenges posed by abundance and scarcity alike. Finally, we will look at a city comedy entitled Eastward Ho! by Ben Jonson, John Marson and George Chapman along with a range of historical sources. Selected theory and criticism by authors such as Michel Foucault, Marcel Mauss, Marc Shell and Patricia Parker is also on the agenda. The seminar will combine synchronous and asynchronous teaching methods. Please acquire decent critical editions of the two Shakespeare plays, all other course materials will be made available on online.
This class will be dedicated to a fairly marginal and-at first glance-rather unexciting female ch... more This class will be dedicated to a fairly marginal and-at first glance-rather unexciting female character from Homer's Odyssey: Penelope. While her husband Odysseus, "man of many turns", helps the Greeks to win the war against Troy before he embarks on a tumultuous journey across the Aegean, fighting Cyclopes and shacking up with goddesses on the way, Penelope sits faithfully at home, engaged in the futile activity of weaving and constantly unraveling a shroud for King Laertes in order to keep her suitors at bay. The first glance is deceiving. Penelope's story has not only provoked numerous adaptations throughout English literary history, it is also quite interesting from a theoretical point of view: It can be read as a metatextual, narratological, metamnemonic story that reflects on the fundamental conditions and functions of storytelling. Penelope's repeated act of unraveling her weave (lat. textum) results in the delay of her own story while at the same time creating a narrative space for other stories to unfold. It can be read as a performance of remembrance, as a deferral of death, even as the enactment of an alternative economy whose commitment to futile activity defies ideologies of productivity. This seminar offers an introduction to the study of literature based on literary and theoretical adaptations of the Penelope material from various periods of English literature. We will read excerpts from Emily Wilson's celebrated new translation of the Odyssey and James Joyce's Ulysses, we will study Margaret Atwood's Penelopiad from the Canongate Myths series and Enda Walsh's Penelope-play as well as poems by various authors such as Ann Killigrew, Wallace Stevens, Edwin Muir, and Louise Glück. Theoretical perspectives will include Iser, Auerbach, Jakobson, and others. The class will be taught in a predominantly synchronous manner through weekly Zoom meetings, but occasionally there will be time for independent reading and written engagements with our class materials.
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Papers by Kathrin Bethke
Book Chapters by Kathrin Bethke
Conference Papers by Kathrin Bethke
Courses by Kathrin Bethke