Seminar 5 - THE CRISIS OF DEATH

PERSPECTIVES ON DEATH AND DYING IN SHAKESPEARE’S TIME AND TODAY

Academic year:

2018/19

Seminar n°:

5 (Week 1)

Teachers:

Agnieszka ROMANOWSKA

University:

Jagiellonian University Kraków

Seminar presentation:

While in early modern Europe the brutal commonness of death and dying was experienced on a daily basis, it is often claimed that, with the development of medicine and technology, mortality has become one of the post-modern taboos. Public executions, admonitory displays of dead bodies or mass graves of plague victims seem to be as remote from us as ars moriendi and ritualization of dying. Are they? With terrorism, acts of violence disseminated via media and global spread of deadly viruses we are nowadays confronted with the omnipresence of death more acutely than we would like to admit.

Death is treated in this seminar both as the critical moment in every human life and as one of the facets of social and political crises. The participants will explore individual and communal aspects of death in early modern culture and today, examine how death and dying is depicted in a selection of Shakespeare’s plays, and scrutinise how death and death-related themes present in Shakespearean productions for stage and screen, are used in today’s cultural discourse on mortality.

In the video, for 2019 New Faces edition, replace "Szeged" by "Porto" (min. 2'38)

NFsem5_Romanowska-Kowalska

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