Literary Criticism - General & Miscellaneous, Modern Philosophy - 20th Century, English Drama - 16th-17th Century - Elizabethan & Jacobean Eras - Shakespeare - Literary Criticism, Literary Theory - Major Schools, Philosophy & Literature, Social Sciences -

A Buddhist's Shakespeare

Name: A Buddhist's Shakespeare
Author: James Howe
ISBN: 9780838635223

by Howe, James

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Overview

In this volume, James Howe analyzes nine Shakespearean dramatic texts, as well as several examples of Western visual art drawn from the sixth to the seventeenth centuries, from a Buddhist perspective. He explains in the process how this perspective parallels Jacques Derrida's ideas about "differance" and how a Buddhist approach to literature can make visible those affirmations which remain invisibly "absent" in Derrida. Assuming the relations between literature and society described by Michel Foucault and the new historicists, Howe studies affirmative possibilities in Shakespeare and disputes the pessimism implicit in much new historicist scholarship. Further, his analysis of visual art demonstrates that certain Buddhist-like positions have always been implicit in the Western tradition. The self-deconstructive nature of Shakespeare's plays brings these affirmative positions forcefully to the surface. In this argument, Howe applies his Buddhist perspective to some key ideas of neo-Marxists, Michel Foucault, and new historicists concerning the relations between literature and society. This perspective provides new challenges to the Marxist view that society necessarily determines our consciousness, Foucault's position that everyone in society is necessarily enclosed within a power field of competing and therefore oppositional interests, and the new historicist position that a society's established authority maintains itself in part by legitimating dissent in order to contain it. Howe proposes instead the possibility of a non-oppositional, nonideological posture in which one can stand apart from the class oppositions of Marx, the power field of Foucault, and the containment of dissent alleged by many new historicists, yet in a way which actually reduces the misery caused by social injustice. Engaging contemporary theoretical debate, Howe draws a parallel between Jacques Derrida's ideas about "differance" - in which "presence" occurs only in "absence" - and the Bud

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Editorials

Library Journal

In this groundbreaking study, Howe analyzes nine Shakespeare plays and several examples of Western visual art from a Buddhist perspective. This is a less startling approach than it might at first appear because as Howe (English emeritus, Univ. of Vermont) shows, since the fashionable literary theory of deconstruction employs methods that are similar to the Buddhist approach to human experience. But in contrast to deconstruction and its offshoot, new historicism, which preclude the possibility that literature may offer an affirmative vision of human freedom, Howe shows that Shakespeare's plays are self-deconstructive to positive effect: in exposing the illusory nature of conventional notions of the stability of the self, the plays travel from samsara (the cycle of desire and suffering) to nirvana , the egoless condition of freedom. For academic libraries.-- Bryan Aubrey, Fairfield, Ia.