Agenda

Emma Mason (The University of Warwick), What does Theology offer the Environmental Humanities?

Like most current trends in literary criticism, the Environmental Humanities declares itself to be firmly secular, its various methodologies keen to focus critics on the earthen and material. But doing so places limits on those it needs to reach, excluding as it does a large majority of the world’s population who are embedded in sacred traditions of thinking, reading, and writing. This lecture discusses the consequences of the erasure of Christian theology from the Environmental Humanities, despite the latter’s dependence on the its tradition for a sacred and imaginative language through which to approach its central questions. I argue that theology offers the Environmental Humanities a language of care and love enacted in literature. Without theology, environmental study risks a forgetting of its own history and struggles to articulate and make meaningful its agenda. I explore these questions with reference to poems by Gerard Manley Hopkins, Christina Rossetti, and Rainer Maria Rilke, as well as Shakespeare’s King Lear.

The lecture includes a presentation of the special issue of the journal Tetxus “Environmental Humanities and English Literary Studies: Facing the Crisis of the Imagination” (3, 2021)

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To participate online, please email Professor Shaul Bassi at bassi@unive.it to receive the Zoom link.