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In this study, the author offers new interpretations of
Shakespeare's works in the context of two major contemporary
notions of collectivity: the crowd and rumour. The plays illustrate
that rumour and crowd are mutually dependent; they also betray a
fascination with the fact that crowd and rumour make individuality
disappear. Shakespeare dramatizes these mechanisms, relating the
crowd to class conflict, to rhetoric, to the theatre and to the
organization of the state; and linking rumour to fear, to fame and
to philosophical doubt. Paying attention to all levels of
collectivity, Wiegandt emphasizes the close relationship between
the crowd onstage and the Elizabethan audience. He argues that
there was a significant - and sometimes precarious - metatheatrical
blurring between the crowd on the stage and the crowd around the
stage in performances of crowd scenes. The book's focus on crowd
and rumour provides fresh insights on the central problems of some
of Shakespeare's most contentiously debated plays, and offers an
alternative to the dominant tradition of celebrating Shakespeare as
the origin of modern individualism.
In this study, the author offers new interpretations of
Shakespeare's works in the context of two major contemporary
notions of collectivity: the crowd and rumour. The plays illustrate
that rumour and crowd are mutually dependent; they also betray a
fascination with the fact that crowd and rumour make individuality
disappear. Shakespeare dramatizes these mechanisms, relating the
crowd to class conflict, to rhetoric, to the theatre and to the
organization of the state; and linking rumour to fear, to fame and
to philosophical doubt. Paying attention to all levels of
collectivity, Wiegandt emphasizes the close relationship between
the crowd onstage and the Elizabethan audience. He argues that
there was a significant - and sometimes precarious - metatheatrical
blurring between the crowd on the stage and the crowd around the
stage in performances of crowd scenes. The book's focus on crowd
and rumour provides fresh insights on the central problems of some
of Shakespeare's most contentiously debated plays, and offers an
alternative to the dominant tradition of celebrating Shakespeare as
the origin of modern individualism.
This volume clarifies the meanings and applications of the concept
of the transnational and identifies areas in which the concept can
be particularly useful. The division of the volume into three parts
reflects areas which seem particularly amenable to analysis through
a transnational lens. The chapters in Part 1 present case studies
in which the concept replaces or complements traditionally dominant
concepts in literary studies. These chapters demonstrate, for
example, why some dramatic texts and performances can better be
described as transnational than as postcolonial, and how the
transnational underlies and complements concepts such as world
literature. Part 2 assesses the advantages and limitations of
writing literary history with a transnational focus. These chapters
illustrate how such a perspective loosens the epistemic
stranglehold of national historiographies, but they also argue that
the transnational and national agendas of literary historiography
are frequently entangled. The chapters in Part 3 identify
transnational genres such as the transnational historical novel,
transnational migrant fiction and translinguistic theatre, and
analyse the specific poetics and politics of these genres.
"Kai Wiegandt's study offers a nuanced, thoroughgoing and deeply
engaging account of novelist J.M. Coetzee's revision of our core
ideas of the human-not least the human sense of uniqueness that we
have invested in our belief in reason and conviction of
God-likeness. He persuasively analyses the careful ways through
which Coetzee deploys narrative as a mode of thinking through such
human and post-human questions, so developing a fresh and original
approach Wiegandt calls 'anthropological realism'. Drawing on
thinkers from across the French, German and Anglophone traditions,
Wiegandt has produced a fiercely insightful and committedly
interdisciplinary study." - Elleke Boehmer, Professor of World
Literature in English, University of Oxford "J.M. Coetzee's
Revisions of the Human offers a bold and compelling argument that
is sure to make a serious intervention in Coetzee criticism.
Wiegandt introduces several new fields of enquiry in relation to
Coetzee's fiction; the discussions thus reframe well-worn debates
in an innovative way, making for unexpected insights in seemingly
familiar critical terrain. The book opens up a valuable and
thought-provoking perspective on Coetzee's work, and will be of
particular interest to the philosophically-minded Coetzee
specialist." - Carrol Clarkson, Professor and Chair of Modern
English Literature, University of Amsterdam "Tracking skilfully
across the shifting terrain of J. M. Coetzee's fictions, Kai
Wiegandt draws out their philosophical and literary intertexts in
this lucid, erudite and compelling book, and thereby illuminates a
fundamental concern that has persisted throughout Coetzee's career:
to probe and push our ideas of what it is to be human." - Jarad
Zimbler, author of J. M. Coetzee and the Politics of Style This
study argues that the most consistent concern in Coetzee's oeuvre
is the question of what makes us human. Ideas of the human that
stress language use, reason, self-consciousness, autonomy and
God-likeness are revised in his novels via a 'poetic of testing'
which pits intertextually referenced ideas against each other in
polyphonic narratives. In addition to examining the philosophical
provenance of questions of the human in the work of such thinkers
as Plato, Hegel, Heidegger, Barthes and Foucault, the study charts
Coetzee's reconfiguration of elements drawn from major literary
precursors like Cervantes, Heinrich von Kleist, Kafka and Beckett.
Its leading argument is that Coetzee revises the Enlightenment idea
of the human as a disengaged, autonomous thinker by demonstrating
the limitations of reason; that he instead offers a view of
humanity as engaged agency, a view most compatible with ideas
developed in the discourse of post humanism, theories of
materiality and social practice theory; and that his revisions
depend on narrative form as much as they recommend a narrative
approach to ideas in general.
"Kai Wiegandt's study offers a nuanced, thoroughgoing and deeply
engaging account of novelist J.M. Coetzee's revision of our core
ideas of the human-not least the human sense of uniqueness that we
have invested in our belief in reason and conviction of
God-likeness. He persuasively analyses the careful ways through
which Coetzee deploys narrative as a mode of thinking through such
human and post-human questions, so developing a fresh and original
approach Wiegandt calls 'anthropological realism'. Drawing on
thinkers from across the French, German and Anglophone traditions,
Wiegandt has produced a fiercely insightful and committedly
interdisciplinary study." - Elleke Boehmer, Professor of World
Literature in English, University of Oxford "J.M. Coetzee's
Revisions of the Human offers a bold and compelling argument that
is sure to make a serious intervention in Coetzee criticism.
Wiegandt introduces several new fields of enquiry in relation to
Coetzee's fiction; the discussions thus reframe well-worn debates
in an innovative way, making for unexpected insights in seemingly
familiar critical terrain. The book opens up a valuable and
thought-provoking perspective on Coetzee's work, and will be of
particular interest to the philosophically-minded Coetzee
specialist." - Carrol Clarkson, Professor and Chair of Modern
English Literature, University of Amsterdam "Tracking skilfully
across the shifting terrain of J. M. Coetzee's fictions, Kai
Wiegandt draws out their philosophical and literary intertexts in
this lucid, erudite and compelling book, and thereby illuminates a
fundamental concern that has persisted throughout Coetzee's career:
to probe and push our ideas of what it is to be human." - Jarad
Zimbler, author of J. M. Coetzee and the Politics of Style This
study argues that the most consistent concern in Coetzee's oeuvre
is the question of what makes us human. Ideas of the human that
stress language use, reason, self-consciousness, autonomy and
God-likeness are revised in his novels via a 'poetic of testing'
which pits intertextually referenced ideas against each other in
polyphonic narratives. In addition to examining the philosophical
provenance of questions of the human in the work of such thinkers
as Plato, Hegel, Heidegger, Barthes and Foucault, the study charts
Coetzee's reconfiguration of elements drawn from major literary
precursors like Cervantes, Heinrich von Kleist, Kafka and Beckett.
Its leading argument is that Coetzee revises the Enlightenment idea
of the human as a disengaged, autonomous thinker by demonstrating
the limitations of reason; that he instead offers a view of
humanity as engaged agency, a view most compatible with ideas
developed in the discourse of post humanism, theories of
materiality and social practice theory; and that his revisions
depend on narrative form as much as they recommend a narrative
approach to ideas in general.
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