Tempestuous Times

„Tempestuous Times“ engages with the multiple ways in which Shakespeare’s The Tempest flags, constructs, and deconstructs multiple temporalities and topographies, thereby establishing a broad variety of different forms of literary and social, but above all temporal communities. While scholars have comprehensively discussed The Tempest’s wide range of references to contemporaneous textual cultures (travel writing, plays, humanist philosophy) and the classics (Greek novel, Virgil, Ovid), analysing the play’s ambiguous, colonial geographies, the various temporalities constructed by way of such references remain largely unexplored. Our workshop focuses on constructions of specific temporalities by way of allusions to specific texts, places, and artefacts and/or by way of meta-dramatic references to performance practices etc. We are also interested in the literary-aesthetic, socio-political, and ideological implications that arise as multiple temporalities interact. Moreover, papers explore the larger issue of periodisation brought into play by The Tempest’s ostensible construction of a Renaissance master-narrative through the showcasing of both contemporary Renaissance discourses and a concomitant recourse to the classics that seems to obscure the medieval.

Programme

Thursday, 4 November

15:00 | Coffee

15:30 | Andrew James Johnston and Lea von der Linde (Freie Universität Berlin): Welcome Address

16:00 | Wolfram Keller (Freie Universität Berlin): Introduction: Tempestuous Temporalities

17:00 | Coffee break

17:30 | Sarah Lewis (King’s College London): ‚[T]he present business | Which now’s upon’s‘: Time and Tide in The Tempest

18:30 | Lauren Shohet (Villanova University): Temporal Interface in The Tempest

Friday, 5 November

14:00 | Stephan Laqué (Freie Universität Berlin): Prospero’s kairotic magic

15:00 | Philip Schwyzer (University of Exeter): Prospero in the Graveyard: Proleptic Mourning and the Language of Epitaphs in The Tempest

16:00 | Coffee break

16:30 | Gordon McMullan (King’s College London): The Tempest’s Colonial Chronologies

17:30 | Peter Löffelbein (Freie Universität Berlin): When is Prospero’s Island?

18:30 | Coffee break

19:00 | Timothy Arner (Grinnell College): TBA

Saturday, 6 November

14:00 | Cathy Shrank (University of Sheffield): Timely Counsel and Its Absence in Shakespeare’s Tempest

15:00 | Marlene Dirschauer (Freie Universität Berlin): Rich and Strange Afterlives: The Transformations of The Tempest in T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land

16:00 | Coffee break

16:30 | Claudia Olk (Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München): Tempestuous Endgames

17:30 | Roundup

Further Information

The workshop will be held as a hybrid event. Due to the hybrid format and limited seats available we would like to ask anyone who is interested to register with Lea von der Linde: lea.vonderlinde@fu-berlin.de