| Description | Natalie Eschenbaum’s (academic) relationship with disgust began when she stumbled across this seventeenth-century poem by Robert Herrick: “Reapes eyes so rawe are, that (it seemes) the flyes / Mistake the flesh, and flye-blow both his eyes; / So that an Angler, for a daies expence, / May baite his hooke, with maggots taken thence.” She wondered: Why would Herrick write about poor Reape in poetic form? And why did she immediately want to re-read the poem when she should have been repulsed? If, as Aristotle claims, the purpose of poetry is to delight and instruct, why does disgust sometimes delight and how or what does it instruct? In this talk, she will share some of what she has discovered about the aversive emotion while we together relish some of the most revolting poems of the Renaissance. Natalie K. Eschenbaum, Ph.D., is Professor and Dean of the School of Interdisciplinary Arts & Sciences at the University of Washington Tacoma. She has been teaching writing, literature, and first-year seminar courses for almost twenty-five years. Her research focuses on sensation studies and affect theory (specifically the affect of disgust) in early modern English literature. She publishes on Shakespeare and seventeenth-century poets, including Robert Herrick, and is co-editor (with Barbara Correll) of Disgust in Early Modern English Literature (Routledge 2016). |
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