ENGL 6261

Forms-of-Life: Power and Thought in Early Modern Drama

Course Description

Course information provided by the 2025-2026 Catalog.

At least since Samuel Johnson’s 1778 Preface to Hamlet, if not before, Shakespeare’s drama has been understood to “exhibit various forms of life.” The “weary,” “dear,” “singular,” “peculiar,” and “calamitous” life staged in Hamlet is, in turn, often linked to the play’s own dramatic form of tragedy, or what Shakespeare called “Tragical Historie.” Implicit to this history is the long standing problem of the relationship between “life” and – especially dramatic – form. While the problem of “forms of life” has long been an object of philosophical investigation, from Hamann, Herder, Hegel, and von Humboldt, through, in different ways, Husserl and Wittgenstein, recent work differs from this tradition by turning from epistemological, ontological, or logical considerations, toward the question of “life” understood as a bio-political, theo-political, aesthetic and/or technological production. If, for Wittgenstein, the problem of life forms was a question of language (“to imagine a language means to imagine a life-form” [Philosophical Investigations, para. 19]), for Giorgio Agamben[1] a form-of-life is “a life that can never be separated from its form [and] a life of power.” In response to renewed interest in philosophical criticism on the question of the human or even the “post-human,” the purpose of the seminar is to explore the relationship between conceptualized and un-conceptualized forms of life as these are imagined in sixteenth and seventeenth century literature and drama.

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