Touching at a Distance
- Studies the capacity of Shakespeare’s plays to touch and think about touchBased on plays from all major genres: Hamlet, The Tempest, Richard III, Much Ado About Nothing and Troilus and CressidaCentres on creative, close readings of Shakespeare’s plays, which aim to generate critical impulses for the 21st century readerBrings Shakespeare Studies into touch with philosophers and theoreticians from a range of disciplinary areas – continental philosophy, literary criticism, psychoanalysis, sociology, phenomenology, law, linguistics: Friedrich Nietzsche, Maurice Blanchot, Jacques Lacan, Luce Irigaray, Jacques Derrida, Roland Barthes, Niklas Luhmann, Hans Blumenberg, Carl Schmitt, J. L. AustinTheatre has a remarkable capacity: it touches from a distance. The audience is affected, despite their physical separation from the stage. The spectators are moved, even though the fictional world presented to them will never come into direct touch with their real lives. Shakespeare is clearly one of the master practitioners of theatrical touch. As theStudies the capacity of Shakespeare’s plays to touch and think about touchBased on plays from all major genres: Hamlet, The Tempest, Richard III, Much Ado About Nothing and Troilus and CressidaCentres on creative, close readings of Shakespeare’s plays, which aim to generate critical impulses for the 21st century readerBrings Shakespeare Studies into touch with philosophers and theoreticians from a range of disciplinary areas – continental philosophy, literary criticism, psychoanalysis, sociology, phenomenology, law, linguistics: Friedrich Nietzsche, Maurice Blanchot, Jacques Lacan, Luce Irigaray, Jacques Derrida, Roland Barthes, Niklas Luhmann, Hans Blumenberg, Carl Schmitt, J. L. AustinTheatre has a remarkable capacity: it touches from a distance. The audience is affected, despite their physical separation from the stage. The spectators are moved, even though the fictional world presented to them will never come into direct touch with their real lives. Shakespeare is clearly one of the master practitioners of theatrical touch. As the study shows, his exceptional dramaturgic talent is intrinsically connected with being one of the great thinkers of touch. His plays fathom the complexity and power of a fascinating notion – touch as a productive proximity that is characterised by unbridgeable distance – which philosophers like Friedrich Nietzsche, Maurice Blanchot, Jacques Derrida, Luce Irigaray and Jean-Luc Nancy have written about, centuries later. By playing with touch and its metatheatrical implications, Shakespeare raises questions that make his theatrical art point towards modernity: how are communities to form when traditional institutions begin to crumble? What happens to selfhood when time speeds up, when oneness and timeless truth can no longer serve as reliable foundations? What is the role and the capacity of language in a world that has lost its seemingly unshakeable belief and trust in meaning? How are we to conceive of the unthinkable extremes of human existence – birth and death – when the religious orthodoxy slowly ceases to give satisfactory explanations? Shakespeare’s theatre not only prompts these questions, but provides us with answers. They are all related to touch, and they are all theatrical at their core: they are argued and performed by the striking experience of theatre’s capacities to touch – at a distance…
Author details: | Johannes UngelenkORCiDGND |
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DOI: | https://doi.org/10.1515/9781474497848 |
ISBN: | 978-1-4744-9784-8 |
ISBN: | 978-1-4744-9785-5 |
ISBN: | 978-1-4744-9782-4 |
Title of parent work (English): | Edinburgh Critical Studies in Shakespeare and Philosophy : ECSSP |
Subtitle (English): | Shakespeare's Theatre |
Publisher: | Edinburgh University Press |
Place of publishing: | Edinburgh |
Publication type: | Monograph/Edited Volume |
Language: | English |
Date of first publication: | 2023/02/28 |
Publication year: | 2023 |
Release date: | 2024/05/21 |
Number of pages: | 296 |
Organizational units: | Philosophische Fakultät / Institut für Künste und Medien |
DDC classification: | 8 Literatur / 80 Literatur, Rhetorik, Literaturwissenschaft / 800 Literatur und Rhetorik |
Peer review: | Referiert |
Publishing method: | Open Access / Gold Open-Access |
Grantor: | Publikationsfonds für Open-Access-Monografien des Landes Brandenburg |
License (German): | CC-BY-NC - Namensnennung, nicht kommerziell 4.0 International |