In this talk, Mark Payne will present his current investigation on the representation of Nature as a choric presence around human life in Hellenistic poetry, German Romanticism, and the Anglo-American weird tale. Payne will consider how writers have used literature to communicate the experience of animal suffering, created analogies between human and animal societies, and imagined the kind of knowledge that would be possible if human beings could see themselves as animals see them. Mark Payne is professor of Classics and the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago. He is author of Theocritus and the Invention of Fiction (Cambridge University Press, 2007) and The Animal Part: Human and Other Animals in the Poetic Imagination (The University of Chicago Press, 2010), which received the 2011 Warren-Brooks Award for Outstanding Literary Criticism. Sponsored by the Department of Literature