Kaleidoscope Dreams: Falling in Love, with Quarantine (Oxford Wells Lecture 3)

Professor Kathryn Schwarz (Vanderbilt University) will be giving this year's Oxford Wells Lectures on 'Mortal Shakespeare: Death, Debt, Love, Plague'.

The third lecture will take place on 19 November at 5.30pm at the English Faculty on the topic of 'Kaleidoscope Dreams: Falling in Love, with Quarantine'. All welcome; no booking required. Seats will be allocated on a first-come, first-served basis.

Professor Schwarz will be giving four talks with the following titles:

12 November: Death Tricks: Chastity as Killed Vaccine
14 November: Prosopopeia, Or, What Have You Done for Me Lately? 
19 November: Kaleidoscope Dreams: Falling in Love, with Quarantine
21 November: A Plague of Social Subjects: Timon Takes the Cure

The first and last lecture in the series will be followed by a wine reception.

Abstract: 

These reflections revolve around a mortality problem: social systems commit the project of collective preservation to fragile, ephemeral persons. If this investiture binds bodies to the discipline that governs them, it also raises the specter of a twofold obligation, split between the constancy of social values and the urgencies of mortal life. I therefore begin at a site of friction, where changeless precepts meet transient flesh, and my readings trace a sharp double edge. Mortal persons are quarantined by social structures, yet quarantine is seamed through with the liquescent flesh, capricious will, and chancy bonds of mortal persons. Death, in this inquiry, is at once the social death that works as a weapon of control and the bodily death that irrupts into logics of progress and perpetuity.

In tracing these tensions across Shakespearean plays, I consider how often death appears less as a mechanism of closure than as a condition of quotidian life. And I ask what happens when this overlap of living and dying becomes starkly visible, through plot devices that vest social values in specific persons, pass those persons through the change of mortality, and reanimate them as lively presences in the quest for resolution. What does it mean to mediate preservation through transience, to protect constancy through change? What happens when death appears neither as an art nor as an end, but as a potentially undistributed middle between the causes and the effects of social imperatives?

If this sounds improbable, I would simply note how often it happens, even if one narrows the scope to the single value of chastity. Four times in four plays, only death can redeem a woman perceived as wanton; and four times in four plays, a collective belief in her death enables that woman to return not only to life but to marriage. This use of mortality to reshape communal norms and bonds seems sufficiently odd, but I would argue that it happens as well around figures for chauvinism, altruism, kinship, and alliance. So these meditations focus not only on the death tricks that resurrect chastity, but also on prosopopoeia as a revival that is at once potent and fraught; on strategies of quarantine that work less to contain threats than to create crucibles of commingling; and on social death as a banishment that predicates a turbulent return. If death in each of these forms is changeable rather than absolute, then we confront a more flexible understanding of what it means to be held in common. A volatile transience invades and infects the conditions of sociality, subjectivity, compliance, and utility. Embodied persons cannot escape social structures, but they might quicken the stasis of subjects who, in Althusser’s chilling phrase, ‘work all by themselves’. Here I pursue the innate tensions and alternative relations that come into view, between the master narratives of progress and perpetuity and the small acts and debts that bind each to each.

Speaker biography:

Kathryn Schwarz is Gertrude Conaway Vanderbilt Professor of English and Gender and Sexuality Studies at Vanderbilt University. She is the author of Tough Love: Amazon Encounters in the English Renaissance (Duke University Press, 2000), and What You Will: Gender, Contract, and Shakespearean Social Space (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011). She is currently working on a book titled The Transient Renaissance: Contagion, Communion, and Ethical Risk. Her title for the Oxford Wells Shakespeare Lectures is ‘Mortal Shakespeare: Death, Debt, Love, Plague’.