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FDU PRESS
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| Hamlet and the Rethinking of Man |
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Author - Eric P. Levy
Publication Date - May 2009
Number of Pages - 256
ISBN #9780838641392
Contents
Price $55.00 - Price subject to change
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| Description |
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| When a new scholarly study arrives on the market, the first questions asked by professional critics are (a) What contribution does this book make to the field? and (b) How does this book fit into the critical landscape? The expectation is that each new book not only add substantially to the repository of knowledge, but also position itself in relation to extant thought on the topic. The contribution offered by "Hamlet" and the Rethinking of Man concerns the opportunity to consider a profound tragedy in a new way to examine its content from many related angles in the effort to clarify and understand a zone of signification not before disclosed. This zone is extremely difficult to define compactly, with satisfactory accuracy; for each formulation achieves only a partial account of the whole to which it refers. In these circumstances, and with the aim of introducing the project more completely, it is best to resort to the via negativa, and indicate what the analysandum or object of analysis is not. Unlike that in New Historicism, it does not primarily comprise a cluster of particulars which can be historically traced and located. Unlike the concern of post-Structuralism, it does not involve factors which evacuate agency of individual efficacy, and surrender it to ambient codes or influences which reduce subjectivity to the site of their own operation. Unlike gender criticism, "Hamlet" and the Rethinking of Man does not construe humanity as polarized or distinguished by gender in a way that circumscribes or qualifies the scope of each individual. Nor does it divide selfhood into partially intercommunicating compartments, as entertained by the Freudian schema. Further, unlike performance criticism, the book study does not encounter character primarily in terms of its relation to the actor performing it. All of these schools of interpretation, and others invoked in "Hamlet" and the Rethinking of Man, deploy analytical models or lenses which are portable and transferable. That is, they are in principle as applicable to Hamlet as to any other text at least texts within the same historical period. Moreover, each entails a nexus of ideas and conceptual scheme already intact before application to any text. Approaches of this type are invaluable in linking texts: setting out their terms and modes of contact, interpenetration, divergence, and transmission. "Hamlet" and the Rethinking of Man moves in a different direction. In essence, its approach entails illumining the intellectual dynamics of the play the processes by which received constructions that define the human project, and confer substance and direction on the striving of the human individual, undergo critique and transformation. Underpinning this dynamic is a reconsideration of reason the defining attribute of humanity with the result that thinking itself is rethought. That is, as this investigation demonstrates, Hamlet dramatizes an intellectual revolution whereby rationality construed as the deployment of concepts in the act of determining truth or action critiques, shatters, and transcends the relevant Aristotelian-Thomist and other paradigms, even as it invokes and relies on them. Thinking the act of rendering experience intelligible in terms of meaning and purpose is under siege in the world of the play, at bottom because inherited modes of construing reality and the role of "the single and peculiar life" in it is being questioned and displaced (3.3.11). This matter can be clarified by Hamlets question, "what is a man" (4.4.33). In classical definition, man is a rational animal. That is, a human individual is a human individual only through the faculty of rationality which, in turn, constitutes the specific difference the unique quality distinguishing the human species man - from all other species in the genus, animal. But as defining attribute, rationality entails moral task. For in this dispensation, the highest responsibility of the human individual is to manifest proper operation of the faculty by which he or she is an individual. This rational imperative constitutes the foundation of the Renaissance tribute to the dignity of man, as exemplified in Hamlets exclamation, "What a piece of work is man, how noble in reason . . ." (2.2.303-304). As a play, Hamlet investigates the problem of human identity by invoking and challenging concepts central to the Christian-humanist interpretation of rationality. The result is a new formulation of the meaning of being human, but one still founded on the notion that human individuality must be construed in relation to the faculty of reason.
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| Author/Editor Biographies |
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| Eric P. Levy is Associate Professor at The University of British Columbia. He is the author of Beckett and the Voice of Species: A Study of the Prose Fiction and Trapped in Thought: A Study of the Beckettian Mentality, as well as more than fifty articles on topics and texts in Twentieth Century American Literature, Renaissance British Literture, Victorian British Literature, and Twentieth-Century British and Irish Literature and on various other topics, including one article on Christology. |
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