ORCID Identifier(s)

0000-0002-1563-2073

Graduation Semester and Year

2019

Language

English

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy in English

Department

English

First Advisor

Amy L. Tigner

Abstract

Leaf, Bark, Thorn, Root traces the appearance of trees and their constituent parts in five Shakespearean plays: Macbeth, The Tempest, 3 Henry VI, Richard III, and As You Like It. The dissertation shows how these plays reveal arboreal agencies intra-acting with the characters of the play-texts by assessing the mergings of human and arboreal bodies, as well as instances of hacking and hewing inflicted across these bodies. Taking a posthumanist approach informed by ecomaterialism, critical plant studies, and affect theory, I argue that these sites of painful human-arboreal encounter in Shakespeare’s plays initiate potentials for thinking-with and feeling-with, across not only species (in the spirit of Donna Haraway’s Companion Species Manifesto) but also across biological kingdoms. Throughout the dissertation, I complicate philosopher Michael Marder’s theories of plant-thinking via these early modern depictions of and relations to trees, whose complex existences inform the texts in multiple registers. The trees of Shakespeare offer ways into theorizing plant-being that not only reflect early modern preoccupations but also resonate across the centuries, potentially serving as a bridge between historicist and presentist methodological concerns, a useful nexus for facing looming ecological issues like climate change, the effects of which long-lived trees bear bodily witness in their annual growth rings and in the shifting of leaf longevity. Using a version of Jeffrey Jerome Cohen and Lowell Duckert’s “veer ecology,” the chapters of the dissertation represent both arboreal body parts and action verbs (leaf, bark, thorn, root), and illuminate a number of “arborealizations.” Four conceptual tools that I develop from these Shakespearean arborealizations are deciduous-sense, inter-missing time, thornition, and queer rhizosphere. In a coda, I apply these four theoretical eco-tools in a brief reading of A Midsummer Night’s Dream to assess speculative possibilities of vegetal pleasure and desire.

Keywords

Shakespeare, Trees, Ecocriticism, Plant studies, Posthumanism

Disciplines

Arts and Humanities | English Language and Literature

Comments

Degree granted by The University of Texas at Arlington

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