Description
Book SynopsisIn the aftermath of New Historicism and Cultural Materialism, the field of Shakespeare Studies has been increasingly overrun by post-theoretical, phenomenological claims. Many of the critical tendencies that hold the field today—post-humanism, speculative realism, ecocriticism, historical phenomenology, new materialism, performance studies, animal studies, affect studies—are consciously or unwittingly informed by phenomenological assumptions. This book aims at uncovering and examining these claims, not only to assess their philosophical congruency but also to determine their hermeneutic relevance when applied to Shakespeare. More specifically, Unphenomenal Shakespeare deploys resources of speculative critique to resist the moralistic and aestheticist phenomenalization of the Shakespeare playtexts across a variety of schools and scholars, a tendency best epitomized in Bruce Smith’s Phenomenal Shakespeare (2010).
Table of ContentsAcknowledgements Introduction 1 The Unphenomenal “This Nothing’s More than Matter” 2 The Spectre of the Cartesian Subject 3 Misrepresentations Shakespeare and the Phenomenologists 4 What Phenomenology? Kant to Levinas 5 Spontaneous Me 6 The Harm That Good Men and Women Do 7 Affective styles 8 A Pastoral Philosophy 9 What Matters in Shakespeare? 10 Undialing the Dialectic 11 The Maladies of Abstinence No More Cakes and Ale 12 The Naturalization of Reason Who Is Afraid of Ferdinand Derrida? 13 Doing Shakespeare To the Things Themselves 14 Reading Shakespeare Is There a Text in This Play? 15 If Caliban Is a Chimpanzee and Other Posthumanist Conditions 16 The Aesthetic Ideology 17 The Aesthetic Fallacy 18 The Fallacy of Representation 19 The Fallacy of Immediacy 20 The Fallacy of Presentism Bibliographical References Index
