Jung and Shakespeare: Performing Archetypes, Re-Forming America
Jung and Shakespeare: Performing Archetypes, Re-Forming America
Original Lecture Date: March 2, 2019
Recording Length: 2 hours
Ten years after the Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson and John Adams were to be found in...Stratford upon Avon, England, looking for America’s cultural founding father, William Shakespeare! For the next 150 years, Shakespeare would be the most performed author, popular amongst pioneers, cowboys, city slickers and politicians. This session will explore the dreams of the “new” world brought to these shores in plays and rehearsed in performances and readings over the decades. Jung believed that some literature can compensate for cultural bias and/or predict the future.
Susan Rowland is Chair of the Engaged Humanities and the Creative Life MA, earned her Ph.D. from the University of Newcastle and her MAs from the University of London and Oxford University. She was the first Chair of the International Association of Jungian Studies (IAJS). She is author of many studies of Jung, literary theory and gender including C.G. Jung and Literary Theory (1999), Jung: A Feminist Revision (2002), Jung as a Writer (2005), and also edited Psyche and the Arts (2008). Another recent book is C.G. Jung and the Humanities (2010), showing how Jung’s work is a response to the creative, psychological, spiritual, philosophical and ecological crises of our age. In 2012 her book, The Ecocritical Psyche: Literature, Complexity Evolution and Jung was published by Routledge, showing how the Jungian symbol is a portal to nature. Susan’s work is not so much “about” Jung as an attempt to develop his special insights into myth, technology, the feminine, nature and the numinous for today’s wounded world.