CFP

Epistémè (Sorbonne Nouvelle) sponsored Panel – RSA, Boston, 2025

Thanatic Self-Fashioning: Attempted Suicides in Early Modern England, On- and Off-Stage

Following Emile Durkheim’s impulse to take suicide as a research topic, scholar in suicide studies have repeatedly underlined the scopic aspect of self-annihilation, its staged quality (Healy, 904) or even its seemingly inherent “exhibitionis[m]” (Romilly Fedden, 67). Such observations invite us to consider suicide as naturally finding its place onstage, as an act of “self-dramatization” (Sanderson, 200). In his 1992 article on the metadramatic nature of suicide on stage, Richard K. Sanderson goes further and posits that suicide is also an act of “self-fashioning” (Sanderson, 200), reprising here Stephen Greenblatt’s influential concept (1984). Sanderson brings into focus the paradoxical idea according to which self-suppression becomes a means through which suicide can fashion identity on the early modern stage? Such an idea has found echoes in numerous publications, notably focalising on the characters of Hamlet (Pollin, 1965; Daniel, 2009), Antony and Cleopatra (Langley, 190), yet little attention has been granted to unsuccessful suicide attempts and uncompleted suicidal thoughts. If, as Sanderson suggests, suicide crafts identities, what can be said of suicidal characters who do not fulfil self-murder, such as William Shakespeare’s Richard II, Christopher Marlowe’s Faustus, or Cyril Tourneur’s Charlemont and Castabella? Recent developments in the studies of suicides, indeed, prompt us to direct our gaze to under-explored areas, notably peripheral phenomena, or “borderline phenomena” (Morrissey, 144), such as indirect suicides and suicide attempts (Healy, 918).

This panel therefore hopes to take a closer look at how unsuccessful attempts of self-suppression or suicidal thoughts complicate the idea of suicide as medium of self-fashioning in early modern England. In an effort to better delineate suicidality in the period, this panel aims to expand its scope to a variety of forms of literary “dramatization” of the suicidal self, both on and off the Elizabethan stage, as, for instance, in diaristic and confessional writings.

200-word proposals, along with a resume, must be sent to irene.vilquin@sorbonne-nouvelle.fr and anne-marie.miller-blaise@sorbonne-nouvelle.fr by July 10th, 2024.