The Harper Lecture series is offered to the University community across the country and around the world by the University of Chicago Alumni Association. Named for the University's first President, William Rainey Harper, the series carries on his vision of broadly accessible and innovative education.
Event Details
Although both The Taming of the Shrew and The Merchant of Venice have both been regularly and successfully produced since the 18th century, they are both plays to which many people have strong negative reactions: feminists--and women in general--to Taming, and Jews and others to Merchant. Strier's presentation is not intended to make such reactions impossible or even inappropriate; instead his talk will seek to mitigate such reactions through a combination of close attention to the texts and the introduction of some historical and cultural context.
Richard A. Strier was educated at the City College of New York and Harvard. He is the Frank L. Sulzberger distinguished service professor in the English Department, the Divinity School, and the College of the University of Chicago, where he has been teaching since 1973. He is the author of Love Known: Theology and Experience in George Herbert's Poetry (1983); Resistant Structures: Particularity, Radicalism, and Renaissance Texts (1996); and most recently The Unrepentant Renaissance from Petrarch to Shakespeare to Milton (2012), which won the 2012 Warren-Brooks Prize for Literary Criticism. He has coedited a number of interdisciplinary collections (with historians and others) and published essays on Shakespeare, Donne, Luther, Montaigne, Milton, and 20th-century poetry and critical theory.
$20 general admission; $10 recent graduate (College alumni of the past ten years and graduate alumni of the past five years).
Speaker Profiles
Richard A. Strier (Speaker)
Frank L. Sulzberger Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus, Department of English, The University of Chicago
http://english.uchicago.edu/faculty/strier
My passion is to bring together two modes of literary study that have, traditionally but needlessly, been seen as antagonistic: formalism and historicism. I am deeply interested in the intellectual history of the early modern period, especially theological and political ideas. I am interested in the ideas themselves but even more in the ways in which they find their way into English and American literature in the period. My book on George Herbert attempts to demonstrate how deeply the central ideas of Reformation theology are at work in the intricate tonal and structural details of the lyrics. My next book, Resistant Structures, brings together methodological and historical concerns. It critiques and tries to work free of various critical and historical schemes and presuppositions; it refuses to idealize "devout humanism" and it refuses to see the thought-world of early modern England as fundamentally conservative and deferential to authority. I demonstrate the presence of resistance to authority in works by Donne (Satire 3), Shakespeare (King Lear), and, in the Restoration period, Nahum Tate (in his adaptation of Lear). My new book, The Unrepentant Renaissance from Petrarch to Shakespeare to Milton, continues the endeavors of historical and intellectual revision, including chapters on text from the whole Renaissance period that praise such things as passion, impatience, worldliness, and pride. My teaching, especially at the graduate level, has followed the whole range of my interests (see below). I have directed dissertations on topics ranging from villain heroes to representations of taverns to the poetics of inarticulateness in Herbert and Dickinson.