Sarah Van der Laan

I write and teach about the European epic tradition and the culture of the European Renaissance. My work centers on a genre—epic, conceived expansively enough to include both romance and opera—and a concept: literary explorations of the value of human experience. My research and teaching arise from a set of core concerns: how does literature offer “tools for living,” in Kenneth Burke’s phrase: ethical reflections on and solutions for the difficulties of ordinary human experience? How can literature be understood as thought experiment, a testing ground for the psychological and social consequences of proposed solutions to religious, ethical, or personal dilemmas?

I approach epic as a conversation about ideas of community, nation, heroism, agency, the scope and the limitations of human nature. The power of epic, I argue, lies in its profound commitment to asking hard questions and wrestling with complex issues in public. Epics insist that literary explorations of how to live have real power to shape the world. These epic conversations—sustained across chasms of history, language, and culture—offer models for dialogue between real-world others, and even real-world adversaries. Epic is a place to critique, and thus to remake, the self from the perspective of the other.

My first book, The Choice of Odysseus: Homeric Ethics in Renaissance Epic and Opera, argues that Renaissance readers turned to the Odyssey for a poetic ethics—tools for living developed in poetry—for belated, post-war, post-humanist societies. The book centers on readings of works by Francesco Petrarch, Angelo Poliziano, Lodovico Ariosto, Torquato Tasso, Edmund Spenser, Claudio Monteverdi, and John Milton, and situates their rewritings of Homer’s epic in the larger cultural history of the Odyssey in the Renaissance. I show that through rewritings of the Odyssey, epic poets and opera composers explore the value of human experience and enable Renaissance audiences to understand ordinary life, for both men and women, as quietly heroic in its own right.

My second book project takes up questions of female heroism: the achievements of women who step into roles usually occupied by men, or into spheres usually reserved for men, and who excel to a degree that, in men, qualifies as heroic. Some of these roles are military; some are political, or marry the political and the personal; some are intellectual. Some use the same weapons as their male counterparts, while others use verbal weapons of lament and emotional appeal that make more explicit acknowledgement of their gender. But all of them pose the same questions: how do we measure women’s actions in a sphere and on a scale designed for men? How does the gender of the performer affect our assessment of the heroic acts performed? How does female heroism invite us to reconsider norms and values of both femininity and masculinity? This project ranges across classical and Renaissance lyric and epic poetry, opera and madrigal, from the female knights of Renaissance epic and romance to the female characters and writers who mobilize Ovidian lament to find their own voices, to assert their moral equality with (if not superiority to) the men who surround them, and to use the resources at their command to get what they want.