Blind Spots of Knowledge in Shakespeare and his World

A blind spot suggests an obstructed view, or partisan perception, or a localized lack of understanding. Just as the brain reads the blind spot of the visual field by a curious process of readjustment, Shakespearean drama disorients us with moments of unmastered and unmasterable knowledge, recasting the way we see, know and think about knowing. Focusing on such moments of apparent obscurity, this volume puts methods and motives of knowing under the spotlight, and responds both to inscribed acts of blind-sighting, and to the text or action blind-sighting the reader or spectator. While tracing the hermeneutic yield of such occlusion is its main conceptual aim, it also embodies a methodological innovation: structured as an internal dialogue, it aims to capture, and stake out a place for, a processive intellectual energy that enables a distinctive way of knowing in academic life; and to translate a sense of intellectual community into print.https://scholarworks.wmich.edu/mip_smemc/1004/thumbnail.jp

Change and Exchange: Economies of Literature and Knowledge in Early Modern Europe

The introductory essay outlines the way in which Change and Exchange places literature, and, in a wider sense, imaginative practice, at the centre of early modern economic knowledge. Probing the affinity between economic and metaphorical experience in terms of the transactional processes of change and exchange, it sets up the parameters within which the essays in the volume collectively forge a language to grasp early modern economic phenomena and their epistemic dimensions. It prepares the reader for the stimulating combination of materials that the book presents: the range of generic contexts engendered by emergent economic practices, structures of feeling and modes of knowing made available by new economic relations, and economies of transformation in discursive domains that are distinct from ‘economics’ as we understand it but cognate in their intuition of change and exchange as shaping agents

Forms of Justice

In her last testament, Paradiso, the philosopher Gillian Rose asserts ‘a refusal to adopt or affirm the opposition between law and love which has so marred the development of Christian theology’, and, by implication, Western thought about justice. It is in this courageous, revisionist tradition that Regina Schwartz’s impassioned book Loving Justice, Living Shakespeare positions itself, and in turn locates Shakespeare’s works, as it issues a clarion call for the integration of ethics and affect in creative as well as critical practice. But it is also an invitation to live a larger life, to operate in an economy of plenitude, not of scarcity, and to rethink the particulars of love in an age of suspicion and hardening insularity. Its agenda is unabashedly one of healing: healing a rupture between loving and judging, the personal and the political, textual and social practice, and between being critical and being human. And its central claim is that Shakespeare shows us how to do this: not through any resounding moral abstraction or impersonal doctrine of moral good, but through dramatising specific human encounters and relations that invite us to recalibrate the ‘justice imaginary’ we inhabit (p. 6). For it is in our negotiation of the need and worthiness of the other – Rose calls it ‘loveability’, and Schwartz ‘intrinsic value’ (p. 7), to be contrasted with desert or merit – that we exercise justice, or fail to be just; it is in laying ourselves open to the risk of encounter that we practice equity, and bring truth into dialogue with love. When, in securing protective walls around our own selves and interests at times of crisis, we refuse to engage with the reality of the other or to respond to their questioning, we miscarry quotidian justice and degrade the original gift of love by robbing another’s dignity. Implicit in Schwartz’s narrative - which begins with a deeply personal experience of care and ends with a daringly comparative analysis of Shakespeare’s Juliet and Bizet’s Carmen – is the inextricability of capacious living, loving and reading.European Research Fundin

Facing Justice: Evidence, Legibility and Pensiveness in the Early Modern Imagination

Abstract Law and the literary imagination in early modern England had shared stakes in the relation between face and intent, surface and significance, truth and semblance, nature and artifice. Using the legally attuned dramatist John Webster’s The White Devil as its central example, this chapter probes law’s preoccupation with legibility and the way in which drama enters into dialogue with it. In the process, law emerges an interface between an expressive mode and a hermeneutic model, and thus an imaginative resource for literary writers interested in selfhood and inwardness. Ultimately, the argument intimates how the gaps and dualities of the interrelation between the theatre and the law are used by early modern dramatic practice to conceptualize the larger interrelation between literary and legal epistemologies.</jats:p

Dying and Living with de la Mare

On the last night of the blasted year just past, I suddenly woke up because I thought I heard a noise at the door: knock or whistle. I could not tell what hour it was. I stumbled downstairs to check my garden door and then my front door. Had I dreamt it? The whistle was a wild wind. The knock – it was someone, or something, I was sure, though my eyes just met darkness. But, like Bottom, and any audience in Shakespeare’s theatre, I was hearing sights (and perhaps seeing sounds too). In fact I thought I knew, for a minute, that it was Ma – my mother, who had died on Christmas day in Kolkata, while I was stuck here in cold and dark Cambridge, desperately and ceaselessly trying to get home to India through successive flight cancellations and Covid chaos. I was desperate because place seemed to matter. But perhaps it doesn’t to the dead. And it must not, to the living, when they want to hear-see the dead, and hear-say with them, against distance and spatial reality - a heresy best expressed not in prose but in poetic form, perhaps even in rhyme: Some one came knocking At my wee small door; Someone came knocking, I’m sure – sure – sure… The theatrical analogy is pertinent. Ma was inherently dramatic: she took part in amateur theatricals all her life, wherever she found herself: from her crowded household with eight siblings as she was growing up, to stage-plays at social clubs later in life. She also read and loved poetry in her youth and remembered it, fitfully, in age. And she was fascinated by ghost stories: the only person in our house who knew and loved de la Mare’s stories as well as his poems. Her theatricality and her pleasure in the fiction of phantoms came together in impish pranks she played on people – she got into terrible trouble once when she scared her newish sister-in-law by springing on her from behind a cupboard dressed like a goblin in the night, her face obscured with pale gauze

‘Footfalls echo in the memory’: displaced Durgas and migrant forms

‘Footfalls echo in the memory’: displaced Durgas and migrant forms Durga Puja is one of the biggest Hindu festivals of India, an annual event most widely and exuberantly celebrated in and around Kolkata. On display at the popular Barisha Club ‘pandal’ (pavilion for the installation of idols for religious festivals) in Kolkata through the second week of October was a Durga and her entourage: named ‘Bhaager Ma’, ‘the mother of divisions’ – or perhaps ‘the mother, parcelled out’. Durga the Mother Goddess is depicted as a disoriented, terrified refugee, sitting with her four children, clutching on to her last belongings, in the limbo of a detention centre marked by a cage located in a no-man’s land between the borders of India and Bangladesh. Behind her, a grey screen plays a video showing a muddy patch quivering with footprints hastily left by stealthy feet, big and small, as they fall at night. The footage is uncannily similar to the footfalls visible on YouTube since the BBC published its report of 12 October on Afghan refugees frantically fleeing the Taliban across the Iran-Turkey border, leaving marks on the rough ground as they ‘[sneaked] across’ in desperate hurry (Orla Guerin), while Turkey tightened controls

The dis-orienting orients : a Lacanian reading of Philip Massinger\u27s tragicomedy The Renegado

Philip Massinger\u27s The Renegado (1624) has been widely discussed for its relationship between the Turks, trading and castration. While many critics tend to limit the notion of castration to a Freudian understanding, this article expands the theme to a Lacanian one and discusses how Donusa, the Oriental woman in the play, represents a castrating force with her power of gaze. The article first draws readers’ attention to the presence of Carazie, a eunuch of Donusa, suggesting that his ‘lack’ should make us associate with hers. The exhortation that underpins the play ‘not to meddle with the Turks’ implies the Europeans’ fear of castration, which is simultaneously an anxiety within comedy. Focusing on the encounter between Donusa and Vitelli, this article argues how the Oriental woman can be read as epitomizing the power of the gaze because of her veil. With the help of the psychoanalytic theory of Lacan, and the reading of Žižek, it addresses the dis-orienting power of the Oriental woman. Understanding this portrayal of Donusa, we can see how the combination of comedy and tragedy at the end represents an attempt to subdue this disorienting effect on the stage