In a new Future of the Humanities Project event series—A Bent but Beautiful World: Literature, Art, and the Environment—we delved into the topical area of our environment. In recent years, we have rightly heard much about the world’s environmental problems, dangers, and disasters. However, in this series, we will invite speakers to explore the ways in which art and literature have foregrounded the inspirational beauty, delicacy, and strength of the natural world.
To launch this new series, Kathryn Temple and Michael Scott reflected on their particular theatrical and literary interests in relation to the series’ aims and purpose. In this discussion, Kathryn Temple introduced the series with reflections on the transdisciplinary nature of recent work on art, literature, and the environment, focusing in particular on the role studies of emotion have played in recent years. Michael Scott considered some of the issues raised by writers from Shakespeare to Wallace Stevens, illustrating how different poets through time have celebrated and used images of their environment in a variety of ways and for differing purposes. A Q&A with the audience, moderated by Kathryn Temple and Michael Scott, followed the presentation.
This event was sponsored by the Future of the Humanities Project; the Georgetown Humanities Initiative; the Georgetown Master’s Program in the Engaged and Public Humanities; Campion Hall, Oxford; and the Las Casas Institute (Blackfriars Hall, Oxford). It is part of the one-year-long series: A Bent but Beautiful World: Literature, Art, and the Environment.
