Description
Book SynopsisDoes philosophy gain or lose when it is embedded within literature or embodied by drama? Does literary criticism gain or lose when it turns to literary works as occasions for abstract reflection? Leading literary scholars and philosophers interrogate philosophical dimensions of Shakespeare''s Hamlet with these urgent questions in view.Scholars probe Hamlet''s own insights, assess the significance of philosophy''s literary-dramatic framing by this play, and trace the philosophically-relevant underpinnings revealed by historical transformations in Hamlet''s reception. They focus on the play''s thematizations of subjectivity, knowledge, sex, grief, self-theatricalization.Examining Shakespeare''s play from a philosophical standpoint sharpens the questions the play itself so famously poses: What counts as a proper response to injustice upon realizing that whatever one does, there can be no undoing of the initial wrong? What do our commitments to the dead amount to? How to persist in infusin
Trade Reviewso blithe and smart that it deserves to be adopted in every classroom. Its magic owes to a rare sense of shared purpose and shared tone. * Ellen MacKay, Studies in English Literature *
Table of ContentsSeries Editor's Foreword, Richard Eldridge Editor's Introduction, Tzachi Zamir Chapter 1. On (Not) Making Oneself Known John Gibson Chapter 2. Staging Wisdom through Hamlet Paul Woodruff Chapter 3. Philosophical Sex David Hillman Chapter 4. Self-uncertainty as self-realization Paul A. Kottman Chapter 5. Hamlet's "Now" of Inward Being Sanford Budick Chapter 6. To Thine Own Selves be True-ish: Shakespeare's Hamlet as Formal Model Joshua Landy Chapter 7. "Unpacking the heart": Why it is impossible to say "I love you" in Hamlet's Elsinore David Schalkwyk Chapter 8. Hamlet's Ethics Sarah Beckwith Chapter 9. Interpreting Hamlet: The Early German Reception Kristin Gjesdal
