Kathrin Bethke | Georg-August-Universität Göttingen (original) (raw)

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

Courses by Kathrin Bethke

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.

Shakespeare Seminar 19 Shakespeare's Odysseys, 2022

Forms at Work: New Formalist Approaches in Literature, Culture, and Media, 2021

The Rhetoric of Topics and Forms, 2021

Shakespeare's Odysseys (Shakespeare Seminar der Jahrestagung der Deutschen Shakespearegesellschaft), Bochum, 2022

The love story of Troilus and Criseyde was added to the ancient Troy legend by late medieval writ... more The love story of Troilus and Criseyde was added to the ancient Troy legend by late medieval writers such as Guido delle Collone and Giovanni Boccaccio and has enjoyed vast popularity throughout English literary history until today. This seminar is dedicated to Geoffrey Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde, arguably "the first novel, in the modern sense" (Kittredge), as well as some of its many adaptations: Robert Henryson's Testament of Cressid, a 15 th century apology of Criseyde written in Middle Scots, William Shakespeare's notorious problem play Troilus and Cressida (1605) and finally two recent adaptations of Chaucer's text, namely Francesca Abbate's Troy, Unincorporated, which transposes the medieval legend to a small town in rural Wisconsin (2012), and Lavinia Greenlaw's A Double Sorrow (2014). Especially Criseyde's ambiguous character has allured writers and critics for centuries, we will therefore also look at a number of critical approaches to the material and discuss historical concepts of love and courtship, representations of gender and the dynamics of genre transfer, intertextuality, and literary adaptation. Course Readings Some class materials, including theoretical texts, handouts and links are on OLAT in the folder entitled Course Readings. Please acquire the following editions of our primary texts (check online thrift stores like medimops.de or abebooks.de for used copies): •

Modernism has produced a number of stylistic and aesthetic innovations that impacted not only the... more Modernism has produced a number of stylistic and aesthetic innovations that impacted not only the world of art, but the field of literature as well. Looking at selected literary and theoretical texts by some of the major ‘players’ of British Modernism with its various branches of Imagism, Symbolism, and Aestheticism this class offers an introduction to the analysis of literature. We will read poems by Hulme, Yeats, Eliot, Stein and Loy along with poetological essays by these authors. We will look at different developments in the field of drama, ranging from the lyrical drama of W.B. Yeats and Oscar Wilde’s notorious comedy of manners to Samuel Beckett’s theatre of the absurd. Finally, we will look at short stories by authors such as James Joyce and Virginia Woolf in order to get a sense of how modernist writers innovated narrative style. The many ways in which modernism breaks with aesthetic and stylistic ideals of the past is particularly well suited to discuss central questions of poetics and narratology, intertextuality and literary history. The last 15 minutes of each session will be devoted to practical issues and skills, such as the requirements of oral and written assignments, good scientific practice, libraries and electronic databases, standard references and dictionaries, as well as citation styles. Most class materials will be provided on OLAT but be advised to purchase the NORTON CRITICAL EDITIONs of James Joyce’s Dubliners (ISBN: 978-0-393-97851-3) and Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest (ISBN: 978-0-393-92753-5).

Course Description: Like many poetic genres, elegy is not simply defined by formal features and ... more Course Description: Like many poetic genres, elegy is not simply defined by formal features and literary motifs. Especially in the English tradition elegy is first and foremost the poetic expression of a particular affective state: grief. According to Peter Sacks, elegy can be read as the poetic performance of a process that Sigmund Freud has called "the work of mourning" as it proceeds through various stages of grief and eventually arrives at the topos of consolation. Elegy was extremely popular in the 16 th and 17 th century in England and diversified into various subgenres that also embody different kinds of dealing with loss and absence. Canonical pastoral elegies, such as Edmund Spenser's Astrophel or John Milton's Lycidas usually feature a young poet, who, in lamenting the death of a fellow poet exercises his own poetic voice, thus sublimating his loss in an aesthetic artefact. In contrast, the genre of elegiac complaint embodies an excessive, inconsolable, and potentially infinite process of mourning that often refuses to give up the lost object. Instead, these texts employ a variety of rhetorical tricks in order to reanimate and re-appropriate the lost object in and through poetic language. In the first part of this class we are going to study exemplary texts of different elegiac traditions by authors such as Chaucer, Spenser, Shakespeare, and Mary Sidney Herbert. In the second part we are going to trace the development of the genre throughout English literary history with stops in the era of Romanticism and the 19 th century (Tennyson, Shelley, Gray, Dickinson) to finally embark on a broader exploration of elegiac poetry in the 20 th century (Yeats, Eliot, Auden, Plath, etc.). In addition to giving an overview of the history of English poetry in general, the class is also going to focus on a number of theoretical perspectives and questions regarding the relationship between language and affect, the formation and transformation of literary traditions, as well as the role of gender in poetic processes of mourning. All primary texts are going to be made available online by the beginning of the term. For preparation I recommend: Peter Sacks. The English Elegy. Studies in the Genre from Spenser to Yeats. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987.

Course Description This seminar explores the theoretical and literary history of the affective ph... more Course Description This seminar explores the theoretical and literary history of the affective phenomenon of empathy with a particular focus on its potential to negotiate differences of race and class. According to neuroscientists such as Giacomo Rizzolatti and Vittorio Gallese, empathy is hard wired into the human brain through so-called mirror neurons that enable us to anticipate another person's actions and emotions. 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. Recent research on empathy, on the other hand, has focused increasingly on its darker aspects: Because empathy is always dependent on the perception of similarities, it necessarily excludes the unfamiliar. Despite its implicit promise to mediate differences and to provoke moral action, the scope of empathy can be depressingly limited, as, for instance, the current refugee crisis shows. However, texts as early as Aristotle's Poetics and Lessing's Hamburger Dramaturgie have suggested that empathy can be trained, even manipulated, under aesthetic conditions, which is precisely the feature that makes it such an interesting subject for literary studies. The course will be split into three sections: We will first get an overview of current theoretical perspectives on empathy from disciplines as varied as philosophy, evolutionary biology, and the neurosciences. In the second section we will focus on the emergence of the concept of sympathy in the 18th century. Finally, we will discuss empathy as an aesthetic emotion that can be elicited and shaped through narrative. Two novels will allow for case studies of the way empathy is a) represented and b) modulated through particular narrative strategies. Please acquire copies of Charles Dickens' Hard Times [Norton Critical Edition, ISBN 978-0393284386] and George Eliot's Daniel Deronda [Modern Library Edition, ISBN 978-0375760136]. As preliminary readings, I suggest Fritz Breithaupt, Kulturen der Empathie, Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2009 and Suzanne Keen, Empathy and the Novel, Oxford: OUP, 2007.

The period of the Renaissance in England is characterized by massive economic and social changes:... more The period of the Renaissance in England is characterized by massive economic and social changes: The development of world trade and the emergence of early capitalism transformed the stratification of English society. This constellation brought to the fore a number of cultural technologies that also had a considerable influence on the literary production of the time, namely practices related to money as a medium of exchange (such as usury, counterfeiting, bills of exchange), practices related to the cultural techniques of printing and writing (such as double-entry bookkeeping and new modes of computation that depended on the written calculus rather than the mechanics of the abacus), and finally practices mediated by the body (such as 'counterfeiting' and dissimulating affective states in social situations). These technologies are nothing less than mere practical innovations that come to organize the early modern market economy, they shape social relationships and identities: Shylock's 'person' is famously inseparable from his 'purse'; similarly practices of itemizing and calculating a person's qualities frequently determine love relationships in early modern city comedies. In this seminar we are going to read dramatic texts by William Shakespeare and his contemporaries (Ben Jonson, George Chapman, and John Ford) as well as excerpts from popular treatises on usury, trade, and arithmetic (Thomas Wilson, John Mellis), finally on court culture and the passions (Arthur Warren, Thomas Wright, Robert Burton, etc.) and discuss how economic and technological developments of this highly prolific epistemological constellation are reflected in the literature and theatrical practice of the time.