Steve Mentz | St. John's University (original) (raw)
Uploads
Books by Steve Mentz
by Wendy Beth Hyman, Steve Mentz, Rachel E. Holmes, Carla Della Gatta, Kim Hall, Todd Butler, Eric De Barros, Allison Hobgood, Jennifer Munroe, Jayme Yeo, and Matthew Harrison
Shakespeare and the Pedagogies of Justice: Why Renaissance Literature Matters Now , 2019
This book is for teachers who want to heighten the intellectual impact of their courses by using ... more This book is for teachers who want to heighten the intellectual impact of their courses by using their classrooms as a creative space for social formation and action. Its twenty-one chapters provide diverse perspectives on Shakespeare and early modern literature that engage innovation, collaboration, and forward-looking practices. They model ways of mobilizing justice with early modern texts and claim the intellectual benefits of integrating social justice into courses. The book reconceives the relationship between students and Renaissance literature in ways that enable them – and us – to move from classroom discussions to real-life applications.
Regarding Thomas Nashe’s contributions to our understanding of the printed word and its relation ... more Regarding Thomas Nashe’s contributions to our understanding of the printed word and its relation to authorship, Jonathan Crewe offers the following succinct assessment: “its ‘whole point’ lies in its exploitation of, and bondage to, the emergent technology of printing.” One of the ways in which Nashe fashions himself as an author draws upon the well-worn metaphor of textual reproduction: the printed book is the progeny of the author. The basic premise of this article is that, when we consider how Nashe creates his authorial identity, we may do well to consider the representations of monstrous reproduction during this time. The way in which Nashe employs the metaphor of monstrous reproduction to refer to authorship in his writing illustrates a salient and relevant connection between authorial identity, print culture, and early modern understanding of the reproductive body. I will be focusing on representations of monstrous birth that appear in the Marprelate Tracts, Pierce Penniless, and Have With You to Saffron Walden.
Shipwreck Modernity engages early modern representations of maritime disaster in order to describ... more Shipwreck Modernity engages early modern representations of maritime disaster in order to describe the global experience of ecological crisis. In the wet chaos of catastrophe, sailors sought temporary security as their worlds were turned upside down. Similarly, writers, poets, and other thinkers searched for stability amid the cultural shifts that resulted from global expansion. The ancient master plot of shipwreck provided a literary language for their dislocation and uncertainty.
Steve Mentz identifies three paradigms that expose the cultural meanings of shipwreck in historical and imaginative texts from the mid-sixteenth through the early eighteenth centuries: wet globalization, blue ecology, and shipwreck modernity. The years during which the English nation and its emerging colonies began to define themselves through oceangoing expansion were also a time when maritime disaster occupied sailors, poets, playwrights, sermon makers, and many others. Through coming to terms with shipwreck, these figures adapted to disruptive change.
A collection of essays co-edited with Stephen Guy-Bray and Joan Pong LInton on the state of Nashe... more A collection of essays co-edited with Stephen Guy-Bray and Joan Pong LInton on the state of Nashe studies in 2013.
My book on Shakespeare and the ocean explores Shakespeare's dramatizations of the watery world, w... more My book on Shakespeare and the ocean explores Shakespeare's dramatizations of the watery world, with special attention to literary representations of the sea from Homer to Melville to Walcott.
A study of the book market, prose romance, and the transmission of classical prose narrative from... more A study of the book market, prose romance, and the transmission of classical prose narrative from Heliodorus's *Aethiopian Historie* to the Elizabethan fictions of Sidney, Greene, Lodge, and Nashe.
A collection of essays on early modern "true crime" that I co-edited with Craig Dionne of Eastern... more A collection of essays on early modern "true crime" that I co-edited with Craig Dionne of Eastern Michigan University in 2004.
Papers by Steve Mentz
Ashgate eBooks, Nov 16, 2015
Resilience: A Journal of the Environmental Humanities, 2018
Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies, 2013
We need a more colorful eco-palette. As ecological interpretations have become increasingly centr... more We need a more colorful eco-palette. As ecological interpretations have become increasingly central to twenty-first-century literary studies, calls have emerged to move "beyond the green" toward a more variegated spectrum of environmental alternatives. What Jeffrey Jerome Cohen calls "ecology's rainbow" refers to a current goal of the environmental humanities-to pluralize thinking about the relationship between human beings and nonhuman nature. My work in this area has flowed out of oceanic or "blue" ecologies, but the logic of dynamic ecological thinking cannot stop at the water's edge. The need to multiply ecocritical models responds to an increasing recognition, which began in the ecological sciences and has emerged in the humanities and social sciences more recently, that natural systems are more dynamic and less stable than once believed. The logic that moves from stasis and sustainability to dynamic "post-equilibrium" models requires that we match the constant innovations of natural systems with flexible interpretive practices. With this pressure toward dynamism in mind, this essay reconsiders green-but not the old green. Remembering that green is an oceanic as well as terrestrial color, and using a famously opaque phrase from Macbeth as a linguistic cue to reintroduce complexity into our literary models of natural systems, this essay offers immersion in hostile waters as a structure within which to think about the human encounter with nonhuman nature. In this model, it is no longer a question of "being green," but of enduring, with effort and difficulty, inside the "green one." By analyzing a key line from Macbeth, an episode of near-shipwreck in a seventeenth-century sailor's diary, and the moment when the hero washes ashore in Robinson Crusoe, this article discovers the myriad meanings of oceanic green. W e need a more colorful eco-palette. As ecological interpretations have become increasingly central to twenty-first-century literary studies,
Punctum Books, Apr 28, 2014
In the future I want, I am a cormorant. A screeching sea-crow, I perch on a high branch on the Tr... more In the future I want, I am a cormorant. A screeching sea-crow, I perch on a high branch on the Tree of Life over-looking Paradise. My eyes flare with greed, and with two senses of the word "want." Things appear down there, spread out below me, things that I lack ("want") and things that I desire ("want"). "Various" is the word for what I see. "A happy rural seat of various view" (4.247) is the full line in Paradise Lost, but it's just "various" that I crave.1 These three sylla-bles roll around inside my bird's mouth. Various. All of the things that inhabit this Paradise, laid out before me. Not just one thing, but another.
The Routledge Companion to Marine and Maritime Worlds, 1400–1800, 2020
The 10 excerpts below represent my contribution to Marina Zurkow's volume More&More (A Guide ... more The 10 excerpts below represent my contribution to Marina Zurkow's volume More&More (A Guide to the Harmonized System) (Punctum 2016). More&More is an art and research project that explores the language and mechanics of global trade, container shipping, and the exchange of goods. It questions a mercantile structure that by necessity disallows the presence of ocean as a real space in order to flatten the world into a Pangaea of capital. This book, More&More (A Guide to the Harmonized System), is an experimental "brick" of a book that intervenes in the Harmonized Commodity Description and Coding System (also known as the HS Code). The HS Code is the internationally accepted standard of product classification, which codifies the way nations conduct import/export. All legal trade products (and illegal ones that find loopholes) are shipped using this system. More&More (A Guide to the Harmonized System) lists the astonishing variety of items that are shipped around the world...
A reading of sand, swamp, and shit in terms of a "brown" ecological vision, with refere... more A reading of sand, swamp, and shit in terms of a "brown" ecological vision, with reference to Spenser's Amoretti 75, Bunyon's Pilgrim's Progress, Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra, and Borges's Chinese Encyclopedia, among others.
The Age of Thomas Nashe, 2016
The emotional connections that humans feel with other humans seem quite distinct from the ‘oceani... more The emotional connections that humans feel with other humans seem quite distinct from the ‘oceanic feeling’ that confronts us when solitary mortals face the great waters. Uniting these discourses requires drawing together the myriad resources of sea poetry, canonical novels, and multiple theoretical traditions from Freudian psychoanalysis to the ‘blue’ (or oceanic) humanities and contemporary environmental studies. Shifting from narrowly human to post-human ways of understanding our human and nonhuman surroundings enables the novels of Austen and Cervantes to speak to the theoretical perspectives of Luce Irigaray, Sigmund Freud and John Dewey, as well as contemporary figures such as Allan Sekula, Karin Animoto Ingersoll and Christopher Connery. Principles of connection and ‘experience’ unearth new ways of imagining the relationships among humans and between humans and the nonhuman environment that seem particularly valuable in our own moment of ecological crisis and catastrophe.
by Wendy Beth Hyman, Steve Mentz, Rachel E. Holmes, Carla Della Gatta, Kim Hall, Todd Butler, Eric De Barros, Allison Hobgood, Jennifer Munroe, Jayme Yeo, and Matthew Harrison
Shakespeare and the Pedagogies of Justice: Why Renaissance Literature Matters Now , 2019
This book is for teachers who want to heighten the intellectual impact of their courses by using ... more This book is for teachers who want to heighten the intellectual impact of their courses by using their classrooms as a creative space for social formation and action. Its twenty-one chapters provide diverse perspectives on Shakespeare and early modern literature that engage innovation, collaboration, and forward-looking practices. They model ways of mobilizing justice with early modern texts and claim the intellectual benefits of integrating social justice into courses. The book reconceives the relationship between students and Renaissance literature in ways that enable them – and us – to move from classroom discussions to real-life applications.
Regarding Thomas Nashe’s contributions to our understanding of the printed word and its relation ... more Regarding Thomas Nashe’s contributions to our understanding of the printed word and its relation to authorship, Jonathan Crewe offers the following succinct assessment: “its ‘whole point’ lies in its exploitation of, and bondage to, the emergent technology of printing.” One of the ways in which Nashe fashions himself as an author draws upon the well-worn metaphor of textual reproduction: the printed book is the progeny of the author. The basic premise of this article is that, when we consider how Nashe creates his authorial identity, we may do well to consider the representations of monstrous reproduction during this time. The way in which Nashe employs the metaphor of monstrous reproduction to refer to authorship in his writing illustrates a salient and relevant connection between authorial identity, print culture, and early modern understanding of the reproductive body. I will be focusing on representations of monstrous birth that appear in the Marprelate Tracts, Pierce Penniless, and Have With You to Saffron Walden.
Shipwreck Modernity engages early modern representations of maritime disaster in order to describ... more Shipwreck Modernity engages early modern representations of maritime disaster in order to describe the global experience of ecological crisis. In the wet chaos of catastrophe, sailors sought temporary security as their worlds were turned upside down. Similarly, writers, poets, and other thinkers searched for stability amid the cultural shifts that resulted from global expansion. The ancient master plot of shipwreck provided a literary language for their dislocation and uncertainty.
Steve Mentz identifies three paradigms that expose the cultural meanings of shipwreck in historical and imaginative texts from the mid-sixteenth through the early eighteenth centuries: wet globalization, blue ecology, and shipwreck modernity. The years during which the English nation and its emerging colonies began to define themselves through oceangoing expansion were also a time when maritime disaster occupied sailors, poets, playwrights, sermon makers, and many others. Through coming to terms with shipwreck, these figures adapted to disruptive change.
A collection of essays co-edited with Stephen Guy-Bray and Joan Pong LInton on the state of Nashe... more A collection of essays co-edited with Stephen Guy-Bray and Joan Pong LInton on the state of Nashe studies in 2013.
My book on Shakespeare and the ocean explores Shakespeare's dramatizations of the watery world, w... more My book on Shakespeare and the ocean explores Shakespeare's dramatizations of the watery world, with special attention to literary representations of the sea from Homer to Melville to Walcott.
A study of the book market, prose romance, and the transmission of classical prose narrative from... more A study of the book market, prose romance, and the transmission of classical prose narrative from Heliodorus's *Aethiopian Historie* to the Elizabethan fictions of Sidney, Greene, Lodge, and Nashe.
A collection of essays on early modern "true crime" that I co-edited with Craig Dionne of Eastern... more A collection of essays on early modern "true crime" that I co-edited with Craig Dionne of Eastern Michigan University in 2004.
Ashgate eBooks, Nov 16, 2015
Resilience: A Journal of the Environmental Humanities, 2018
Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies, 2013
We need a more colorful eco-palette. As ecological interpretations have become increasingly centr... more We need a more colorful eco-palette. As ecological interpretations have become increasingly central to twenty-first-century literary studies, calls have emerged to move "beyond the green" toward a more variegated spectrum of environmental alternatives. What Jeffrey Jerome Cohen calls "ecology's rainbow" refers to a current goal of the environmental humanities-to pluralize thinking about the relationship between human beings and nonhuman nature. My work in this area has flowed out of oceanic or "blue" ecologies, but the logic of dynamic ecological thinking cannot stop at the water's edge. The need to multiply ecocritical models responds to an increasing recognition, which began in the ecological sciences and has emerged in the humanities and social sciences more recently, that natural systems are more dynamic and less stable than once believed. The logic that moves from stasis and sustainability to dynamic "post-equilibrium" models requires that we match the constant innovations of natural systems with flexible interpretive practices. With this pressure toward dynamism in mind, this essay reconsiders green-but not the old green. Remembering that green is an oceanic as well as terrestrial color, and using a famously opaque phrase from Macbeth as a linguistic cue to reintroduce complexity into our literary models of natural systems, this essay offers immersion in hostile waters as a structure within which to think about the human encounter with nonhuman nature. In this model, it is no longer a question of "being green," but of enduring, with effort and difficulty, inside the "green one." By analyzing a key line from Macbeth, an episode of near-shipwreck in a seventeenth-century sailor's diary, and the moment when the hero washes ashore in Robinson Crusoe, this article discovers the myriad meanings of oceanic green. W e need a more colorful eco-palette. As ecological interpretations have become increasingly central to twenty-first-century literary studies,
Punctum Books, Apr 28, 2014
In the future I want, I am a cormorant. A screeching sea-crow, I perch on a high branch on the Tr... more In the future I want, I am a cormorant. A screeching sea-crow, I perch on a high branch on the Tree of Life over-looking Paradise. My eyes flare with greed, and with two senses of the word "want." Things appear down there, spread out below me, things that I lack ("want") and things that I desire ("want"). "Various" is the word for what I see. "A happy rural seat of various view" (4.247) is the full line in Paradise Lost, but it's just "various" that I crave.1 These three sylla-bles roll around inside my bird's mouth. Various. All of the things that inhabit this Paradise, laid out before me. Not just one thing, but another.
The Routledge Companion to Marine and Maritime Worlds, 1400–1800, 2020
The 10 excerpts below represent my contribution to Marina Zurkow's volume More&More (A Guide ... more The 10 excerpts below represent my contribution to Marina Zurkow's volume More&More (A Guide to the Harmonized System) (Punctum 2016). More&More is an art and research project that explores the language and mechanics of global trade, container shipping, and the exchange of goods. It questions a mercantile structure that by necessity disallows the presence of ocean as a real space in order to flatten the world into a Pangaea of capital. This book, More&More (A Guide to the Harmonized System), is an experimental "brick" of a book that intervenes in the Harmonized Commodity Description and Coding System (also known as the HS Code). The HS Code is the internationally accepted standard of product classification, which codifies the way nations conduct import/export. All legal trade products (and illegal ones that find loopholes) are shipped using this system. More&More (A Guide to the Harmonized System) lists the astonishing variety of items that are shipped around the world...
A reading of sand, swamp, and shit in terms of a "brown" ecological vision, with refere... more A reading of sand, swamp, and shit in terms of a "brown" ecological vision, with reference to Spenser's Amoretti 75, Bunyon's Pilgrim's Progress, Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra, and Borges's Chinese Encyclopedia, among others.
The Age of Thomas Nashe, 2016
The emotional connections that humans feel with other humans seem quite distinct from the ‘oceani... more The emotional connections that humans feel with other humans seem quite distinct from the ‘oceanic feeling’ that confronts us when solitary mortals face the great waters. Uniting these discourses requires drawing together the myriad resources of sea poetry, canonical novels, and multiple theoretical traditions from Freudian psychoanalysis to the ‘blue’ (or oceanic) humanities and contemporary environmental studies. Shifting from narrowly human to post-human ways of understanding our human and nonhuman surroundings enables the novels of Austen and Cervantes to speak to the theoretical perspectives of Luce Irigaray, Sigmund Freud and John Dewey, as well as contemporary figures such as Allan Sekula, Karin Animoto Ingersoll and Christopher Connery. Principles of connection and ‘experience’ unearth new ways of imagining the relationships among humans and between humans and the nonhuman environment that seem particularly valuable in our own moment of ecological crisis and catastrophe.
Early Modern Literary Studies, 2014
The most striking thing about this book is its straightforward intimacy. It comes at you straight... more The most striking thing about this book is its straightforward intimacy. It comes at you straight-on, directly announcing that 'For me, King Lear is alive' (p. 1). I suppose you could call it bio-criticism, not in the Agamben/late Foucault sense but in a rich narrative openness to the way the human experience of living with great literary works over time folds them into your personal history, so that the mad old king starts to feel familiar, connected, part of your life. This is a theatrical book, focused on great performances and productions, and a careful study of the play. By the end you feel as if you'd know Philippa Kelly if you saw her on the street or, say, around a seminar table somewhere. It's also a thoroughly Australian book, wrestling repeatedly with the insight that 'Both Australia and King Lear are forces I am always catching up with. Neither is for me a
The Palgrave Handbook of Early Modern Literature and Science, 2017
Shipwreck Modernity, 2015
Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies, 2013
We need a more colorful eco-palette. As ecological interpretations have become increasingly centr... more We need a more colorful eco-palette. As ecological interpretations have become increasingly central to twenty-first-century literary studies, calls have emerged to move "beyond the green" toward a more variegated spectrum of environmental alternatives. What Jeffrey Jerome Cohen calls "ecology's rainbow" refers to a current goal of the environmental humanities-to pluralize thinking about the relationship between human beings and nonhuman nature. My work in this area has flowed out of oceanic or "blue" ecologies, but the logic of dynamic ecological thinking cannot stop at the water's edge. The need to multiply ecocritical models responds to an increasing recognition, which began in the ecological sciences and has emerged in the humanities and social sciences more recently, that natural systems are more dynamic and less stable than once believed. The logic that moves from stasis and sustainability to dynamic "post-equilibrium" models requires that we match the constant innovations of natural systems with flexible interpretive practices. With this pressure toward dynamism in mind, this essay reconsiders green-but not the old green. Remembering that green is an oceanic as well as terrestrial color, and using a famously opaque phrase from Macbeth as a linguistic cue to reintroduce complexity into our literary models of natural systems, this essay offers immersion in hostile waters as a structure within which to think about the human encounter with nonhuman nature. In this model, it is no longer a question of "being green," but of enduring, with effort and difficulty, inside the "green one." By analyzing a key line from Macbeth, an episode of near-shipwreck in a seventeenth-century sailor's diary, and the moment when the hero washes ashore in Robinson Crusoe, this article discovers the myriad meanings of oceanic green. W e need a more colorful eco-palette. As ecological interpretations have become increasingly central to twenty-first-century literary studies,
This 250,000-word volume of approximately thirty 8,000 word essays seeks to address all aspects o... more This 250,000-word volume of approximately thirty 8,000 word essays seeks to address all aspects of human contact with and experience of the oceans in this transformative phase in seaborne activity across the globe, and economic and cultural growth. It brings together a group of world-leading scholars, as well as some distinctive new voices, with research specialisms in commercial, social, legal, naval, and cultural aspects of maritime studies. Using the latest research the authors gathered here look beyond the traditional boundaries of maritime studies to offer authoritative overviews of key topics combined with penetrative examinations of maritime and ship-board communities, of the social and economic forces that underpinned Europeans’ and non-Europeans’ encounters with the seas. The volume also explores the part individuals and communities played in Europe’s maritime expansionism, and how accounts of activities and exploits were promulgated and promoted. The volume is divided into four broad thematic sections covering the material sea, historiography of the sea, social and political aspects and legal and religious frameworks and, finally, cultural appropriations in a wide range of genres and mediums. Richly illustrated, the essays in this volume cover subjects as wide-ranging as shipping technology, fishing, trade networks, naval activity, ship-board communities, legal and religious practices, as well as the cultural dimensions of the sea.
Series Editors: Claire Jowitt, University of East Anglia, UK & John McAleer, University of Southa... more Series Editors: Claire Jowitt, University of East Anglia, UK & John McAleer, University of Southampton, UK
Editorial board: Mary Fuller, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA; Fred Hocker, Vasa Museum, Sweden; Steven Mentz, St John’s University, USA; Sebastian Sobecki, University of Groningen, Netherlands; David J. Starkey, University of Hull, UK; & Philip Stern, Duke University, USA
Early modern oceans not only provided temperate climates, resources, and opportunities for commercial exchange, they also played a central role in cultural life. Increased exploration, travel, and trade, marked this period of history, and early modern seascapes were cultural spaces and contact zones, where connections and circulations occurred outside established centres of control and the dictates of individual national histories. Likewise, coastlines, rivers, and ports were all key sites for commercial and cultural exchange.
Interdisciplinary in its approach, Maritime Humanities, 1400–1800: Cultures of the Sea welcomes books from across the full range of humanities subjects, and invites submissions that conceptually engage with issues of globalization, post-colonialism, eco-criticism, environmentalism, and the histories of science and technology. The series puts maritime humanities at the centre of a transnational historiographical scholarship that seeks to transform traditional land-based histories of states and nations by focusing on the cultural meanings of the early modern ocean.
Tori Bush, Steve Mentz, Craig Santos Perez, and Brian Russell Roberts discuss recent books relate... more Tori Bush, Steve Mentz, Craig Santos Perez, and Brian Russell Roberts discuss recent books related to the place of water in the Environmental Humanities.