Shakespeare and Deconstruction

Shakespeare and Deconstruction
Author: George Douglas Atkins
Publisher: Peter Lang Incorporated, International Academic Publishers
Total Pages: 302
Release: 1988
Genre: Art
ISBN:

Twelve clear and effective essays shed new light on Shakespeare. The contributors write in, on, and sometimes against deconstruction, the most powerful and controversial theoretical movement in decades. Writing about several plays and sonnets, the critics explore the contribution of deconstruction to our understanding of Shakespeare. This unique and wide-ranging collection of essays will interest Shakespeareans and theorists alike.

Derrida and Theology

Derrida and Theology
Author: Steven Shakespeare
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages: 246
Release: 2009-06-25
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 0567189813

Jacques Derrida: a name to strike fear into the hearts of theologians. His ideas have been hugely influential in shaping postmodern philosophy, and its impact has been felt across the humanities from literary studies to architecture. However, he has also been associated with the specters of relativism and nihilism. Some have suggested he undermines any notion of objective truth and stable meaning. Derrida is now increasingly seen as a major contributor to thinking about the complexity of truth, responsibility and witnessing. Theologians and biblical scholars are engaging as never before with Derrida's own deep-rooted reflections on religious themes. From the nature of faith to the name of God, from Messianism to mysticism, from forgiveness to the impossible, he has broken new ground in thinking about religion in our time. His ideas and writing style remain highly complex, however, and can be a forbidding prospect for the uninitiated. This book examines his philosophical approach, his specific work on religious themes, and the ways in which theologians have interpreted, adopted, and disputed them.

Hamlet after Deconstruction

Hamlet after Deconstruction
Author: Aneta Mancewicz
Publisher: Springer Nature
Total Pages: 241
Release: 2022-10-29
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 3030968065

Post-war European adaptations of Hamlet are defined by ambiguities and inconsistencies. Such features are at odds with the traditional model of adaptation, which focuses on expanding and explaining the source. Inspired by Derrida’s deconstruction, this book introduces a new interpretative paradigm. Central to this paradigm is the idea that an act of adaptation consists in foregrounding gaps and incoherencies in the source; it is about questioning rather than clarifying. The book explores this paradigm through seven representative European adaptations of Hamlet produced between the 1960s and the 2010s: dramatic texts, live theatre productions, and a mixed reality performance. They systematically challenge the post-Romantic idea of Hamlet as a tragedy of great passions and heroic deeds. What does this say about Hamlet’s impact on post-war theatre and culture? The deconstructive analyses offered in this book show how adaptations of Hamlet capture crucial anxieties and concerns of post-war Europe, such as political disillusionment, postmodern scepticism, and feminist resistance, revealing exciting connections between European traditions.

Derrida Reads Shakespeare

Derrida Reads Shakespeare
Author: Chiara Alfano
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
Total Pages: 264
Release: 2020-02-14
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1474409881

This book brings to light Derrida's rich and thought-provoking discussions of Shakespearean drama.

Selling Shakespeare

Selling Shakespeare
Author: Adam G. Hooks
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 379
Release: 2016-02-15
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1316495566

Selling Shakespeare tells a story of Shakespeare's life and career in print, a story centered on the people who created, bought, and sold books in the early modern period. The interests and investments of publishers and booksellers have defined our ideas of what is 'Shakespearean', and attending to their interests demonstrates how one version of Shakespearean authorship surpassed the rest. In this book, Adam G. Hooks identifies and examines four pivotal episodes in Shakespeare's life in print: the debut of his narrative poems, the appearance of a series of best-selling plays, the publication of collected editions of his works, and the cataloguing of those works. Hooks also offers a new kind of biographical investigation and historicist criticism, one based not on external life documents, nor on the texts of Shakespeare's works, but on the books that were printed, published, sold, circulated, collected, and catalogued under his name.

Shakespeare and Contemporary Theory

Shakespeare and Contemporary Theory
Author: Neema Parvini
Publisher: A&C Black
Total Pages: 233
Release: 2012-11-08
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1441193936

A complete critical introduction to New Historicist and Cultural Materialist approaches that have dominated contemporary Shakespeare theory, as well as alternative new directions.

Deconstructing Macbeth

Deconstructing Macbeth
Author: Harald William Fawkner
Publisher: Fairleigh Dickinson Univ Press
Total Pages: 276
Release: 1990
Genre: Drama
ISBN: 9780838633939

Macbeth is discussed in relation to Derrida's notion of the metaphysics of presence. Fawkner argues that the quest for metaphysical certitude in Macbeth is related to the hero's transformation from a heroic to a post-heroic status.

Sonnet's Shakespeare

Sonnet's Shakespeare
Author: Sonnet L'Abbe
Publisher: McClelland & Stewart
Total Pages: 194
Release: 2019-08-20
Genre: Poetry
ISBN: 0771073100

Bronwen Wallace Memorial Award-winning poet Sonnet L'Abbé returns with her third collection, in which a mixed-race woman decomposes her inheritance of Shakespeare by breaking open the sonnet and inventing an entirely new poetic form. DOROTHY LIVESAY POETRY PRIZE FINALIST RAYMOND SOUSTER AWARD FINALIST How can poetry grapple with how some cultures assume the place of others? How can English-speaking writers use the English language to challenge the legacy of colonial literary values? In Sonnet's Shakespeare, one young, half-dougla (mixed South Asian and Black) poet tries to use "the master's tools" on the Bard's "house," attempting to dismantle his monumental place in her pysche and in the poetic canon. In a defiant act of literary patricide and a feat of painstaking poetic labour, Sonnet L'Abbé works with the pages of Shakespeare's sonnets as a space she will inhabit, as a place of power she will occupy. Letter by letter, she sits her own language down into the white spaces of Shakespeare's poems, until she overwhelms the original text and effectively erases Shakespeare's voice by subsuming his words into hers. In each of the 154 dense new poems of Sonnet's Shakespeare sits one "aggrocultured" Shakespearean sonnet--displaced, spoken over, but never entirely silenced. L'Abbé invented the process of Sonnet's Shakespeare to find a way to sing from a body that knows both oppression and privilege. She uses the procedural techniques of Oulipian constraint and erasure poetries to harness the raw energies of her hyperconfessional, trauma-forged lyric voice. This is an artist's magnum opus and mixed-race girlboy's diary; the voice of a settler on stolen Indigenous territories, a sexual assault survivor, a lover of Sylvia Plath and Public Enemy. Touching on such themes as gender identity, pop music, nationhood, video games, and the search for interracial love, this book is a poetic achievement of undeniable scope and significance.

Shakespeare in Theory and Practice

Shakespeare in Theory and Practice
Author: Catherine Belsey
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
Total Pages: 224
Release: 2008-05-22
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0748632158

In these essays, collected here for the first time, renowned critic Catherine Belsey puts theory to work in order to register Shakespeare's powers of seduction, together with his moment in history. Teasing out the meanings of the narrative poems, as well as some of the more familiar plays, she demonstrates the possibilities of an attention to textuality that also draws on the archive. A reading of the Sonnets, written specially for this book, analyses their intricate and ambivalent inscription of desire. Between them, these essays trace the progress of theory in the course of three decades, while a new introduction offers a narrative and analytical overview, from a participant's perspective, of some of its key implications. Written with verve and conviction, this book shows how texts can offer access to the dissonances of the past when theory finds an outcome in practice.

Shakespeare and the Culture of Paradox

Shakespeare and the Culture of Paradox
Author: Peter G. Platt
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 308
Release: 2016-04-01
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1317056523

Exploring Shakespeare's intellectual interest in placing both characters and audiences in a state of uncertainty, mystery, and doubt, this book interrogates the use of paradox in Shakespeare's plays and in performance. By adopting this discourse-one in which opposites can co-exist and perspectives can be altered, and one that asks accepted opinions, beliefs, and truths to be reconsidered-Shakespeare used paradox to question love, gender, knowledge, and truth from multiple perspectives. Committed to situating literature within the larger culture, Peter Platt begins by examining the Renaissance culture of paradox in both the classical and Christian traditions. He then looks at selected plays in terms of paradox, including the geographical site of Venice in Othello and The Merchant of Venice, and equity law in The Comedy of Errors, Merchant, and Measure for Measure. Platt also considers the paradoxes of theater and live performance that were central to Shakespearean drama, such as the duality of the player, the boy-actor and gender, and the play/audience relationship in the Henriad, Hamlet, As You Like It, Twelfth Night, Antony and Cleopatra, The Winter's Tale, and The Tempest. In showing that Shakespeare's plays create and are created by a culture of paradox, Platt offers an exciting and innovative investigation of Shakespeare's cognitive and affective power over his audience.