Nature Abhors a Vacuum – Overcoming Domesticity in “Housekeeping”

In a new Future of the Humanities Project event series — A Bent but Beautiful World: Literature, Art, and the Environment — we delve into the topical area of our environment. In recent years, we have rightly heard much about the world’s environmental problems, dangers, and disasters. However, in this series, we will invite speakers to explore the ways in which art and literature have foregrounded the inspirational beauty, delicacy, and strength of the natural world.

Marilynne Robinson’s first novel, Housekeeping (1980), treats generations of Foster women tending the family home in fictitious Fingerbone, Idaho. They contend with regular lunar floods, a lake that swallows a train full of people, and the alluring call of nature that unsettles staid domesticity. In this talk, Rev. Joseph Simmons, S.J., will discuss Robinson’s deft treatment of the power of the natural world to enchant, confound, and ultimately overtake the family home. Simmons will also consider how Housekeeping, a Pulitzer Prize finalist, fits in with Robinson’s broader interests in ecology, overlooked historical voices, and biblical literacy.

To commemorate the final webinar of the academic year, there will be a Q&A session followed by a panel discussion chaired by Michael Scott with Rev. Joseph Simmons, S.J., Kathryn Temple, and Michael Collins on literature, art, and the environment.

 

Participants:

Rev. Joseph Simmons, S.J. is a Catholic priest and research fellow in the Department of English at Georgetown University. Simmons’ licentiate in sacred theology thesis, “Via Literaria: Marilynne Robinson’s Theology Through a Literary Imagination,” explored the convergence of literary and Christian imaginations. He completed his doctorate at Campion Hall in Oxford. Simmons’ academic interests include phenomenology of attention, theology and literature, and writers “bothered by God.”

Michael Collins is a teaching professor of English and dean emeritus at Georgetown University. He has published essays on Anglo-Welsh poetry in Poetry Wales, World Literature Today, the Dictionary of Literary Biography, and the Anglo-Welsh Review. He is an honorary fellow of Wrexham Glyndwr University, University of Wales, and a recipient of Georgetown University’s Presidential Medal and its Bunn Award for Outstanding Teaching.

Kathryn Temple (moderator) is a professor in the Department of English at Georgetown University where she has taught since 1994. She specializes in the study of law and the humanities. Among her publications are Loving Justice: Legal Emotions in William Blackstone’s England (2019) and the co-edited Research Handbook on Law and Emotions (2021). Her humanities outreach activities include work with military veterans and the incarcerated.

Michael Scott (moderator) is senior dean, fellow of Blackfriars Hall, Oxford, college adviser for postgraduate students, and a member of the Las Casas Institute. He also serves as senior adviser to the president of Georgetown University. Scott previously was the pro-vice-chancellor at De Montfort University and founding vice-chancellor of Wrexham Glyndwr University.

Free and open to all. Registration is required.

 

Contact:
Las Casas Institute with Georgetown University
lascasas@bfriars.ox.ac.uk