Cullman Center Institute for Teachers: King Lear: Catastrophe as a Metaphor with Gerard Passannante

Event Details

King Lear: Catastrophe as a Metaphor with Gerard Passannante

This seminar takes place during spring break.

In the opening scene of King Lear, Lear asks his youngest daughter what she would add to her sisters’ professions of love for him. Cordelia responds, “Nothing.” What follows from this seemingly innocent statement is a shocking display of cruelty. Lear’s “dragon,” as he calls it, is unleashed, and Cordelia is banished. Why was Lear so upset? William Hazlitt compared Lear’s state of mind to a “solid promontory pushed from its basis by the force of an earthquake.” This seminar considers the role of natural catastrophe in framing questions about human agency and knowledge. We will make a close study of Shakespeare’s language and also discuss how various critics account for the play’s violent effects and hidden causes.

Gerard Passannante is Associate Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of Maryland, College Park. He is the author of The Lucretian Renaissance: Philology and the Afterlife of Tradition, which was awarded the American Comparative Literature Association’s 2014 Harry Levin Prize, and numerous articles on Renaissance literature, science, and intellectual history. At the Cullman Center he is working on a book that explores the entanglements of natural disaster and the speculative imagination.

The deadline to apply to this seminar has passed. 

  • Audience: Adults