EVENT DETAILS

Martin Harries, "Theatrum Mundi: The End of a Trope for the World"

The English Graduate Colloquium presents: "Theatrum Mundi: The End of a
Trope for the World" by Professor Martin Harries. Please join us as we
spend 2013 celebrating the new faculty who joined us last year.

Hans Blumenberg has suggested that the figure of the theatrum mundi – the
theater of the world, the world as theater – is one of the “absolute
metaphors” of the western philosophical tradition and belongs among the
“foundational elements of philosophical language” that resist translation.
To this Professor Harries will ask: what happens to the figure in the
theater? How can stages bear the burden of representing the world? And
what is a world? The talk will offer speculations on the strange career
of the theater of the world, with examples from Shakespeare’s The Tempest,
Goethe’s Faust, and Beckett’s Endgame.

Professor of English Martin Harries has authored Forgetting Lot's Wife: On
Destructive Spectatorship (Fordham, 2007) and Scare Quotes from
Shakespeare: Marx, Keynes, and the Language of Reenchantment (Stanford,
2000).