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"Literature and Weather. Shakespeare - Goethe - Zola" is dedicated
to the relation between literature and weather, i.e. a cultural
practice and an everyday phenomenon that has played very different
epistemic roles in the history of the world. The study undertakes
an archaeology of literature's affinity to the weather which tells
the story of literature's weathery self-reflection and its creative
reinventions as a medium in different epistemic and social
circumstances. The book undertakes extensive close readings of
three exemplary literary texts: Shakespeare's The Tempest, Goethe's
The Sufferings of Young Werther and Zola's The Rougon-Macquarts.
These readings provide the basis for reconstructing three distinct
formations, negotiating the relationship between literature and
weather in the 17th, the 18th and the 19th centuries. The study is
a pioneering contribution to the recent debates of literature's
indebtedness to the environment. It initiates a rewriting of
literary history that is weather-sensitive; the question of
literature's agency, its power to affect, cannot be raised without
understanding the way the weather works in a certain cultural
formation.
"Literature and Weather. Shakespeare - Goethe - Zola" is dedicated
to the relation between literature and weather, i.e. a cultural
practice and an everyday phenomenon that has played very different
epistemic roles in the history of the world. The study undertakes
an archaeology of literature's affinity to the weather which tells
the story of literature's weathery self-reflection and its creative
reinventions as a medium in different epistemic and social
circumstances. The book undertakes extensive close readings of
three exemplary literary texts: Shakespeare's The Tempest, Goethe's
The Sufferings of Young Werther and Zola's The Rougon-Macquarts.
These readings provide the basis for reconstructing three distinct
formations, negotiating the relationship between literature and
weather in the 17th, the 18th and the 19th centuries. The study is
a pioneering contribution to the recent debates of literature's
indebtedness to the environment. It initiates a rewriting of
literary history that is weather-sensitive; the question of
literature's agency, its power to affect, cannot be raised without
understanding the way the weather works in a certain cultural
formation.
Theatre 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.
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