Touching at a Distance : Shakespeare's Theatre / Johannes Ungelenk.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Ungelenk, Johannes, Author.

Series:

Edinburgh Critical Studies in Shakespeare and Philosophy Series

Edinburgh Critical Studies in Shakespeare and Philosophy : ECSSP

Language:

English

Physical Description:

1 online resource (288 p.) : 1 B/W illustrations 1 black and white engraving

Edition:

1st ed.

Place of Publication:

Edinburgh : Edinburgh University Press, [2023]

Language Note:

English

System Details:

Mode of access: World Wide Web.

Summary:

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 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.

Contents:

Frontmatter

CONTENTS

Acknowledgements

Abbreviations

Series Editor's Preface

Introduction: Theatrical Contagions

Chapter 1 Theatre's Offence: Hamlet and The Tempest

Chapter 2 Touching the Depth of the Surface: Richard III

Chapter 3 Caressing with Words: Much Ado About Nothing

Chapter 4 Touching Fractions: Troilus and Cressida

Coda: A Philology of Touch

Bibliography

Index

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

This eBook is made available Open Access under a CC BY-NC 4.0 license: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0 https://www.degruyter.com/dg/page/open-access-policy

Description based on online resource; title from PDF title page (publisher's Web site, viewed 29. Mai 2023)

Description based on publisher supplied metadata and other sources.

ISBN:

9781474497848

1474497845

OCLC:

1365105302