Teaching - Literature, English Drama - 16th-17th Century - Elizabethan & Jacobean Eras - Shakespeare - Literary Criticism, Literary Theory - Major Schools

Making Sense of Shakespeare

Name: Making Sense of Shakespeare
Author: Charles H. Frey
ISBN: 9780838638316

by Charles H. Frey

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Overview

This book argues for the existence and deployment of non-visual imagination in the reading and viewing of Shakespeare. It seeks to save the imagination of Shakespeare from abstractness and restore such imagination to a literal concreteness of somatic sensory experience. Instead of considering "the body" from the outside in the manner of cultural critics, Frey considers the reader and viewer's body from the inside in the manner of subjective responders or some affective critics. He argues that Lear's "howl", for example, targets and rewards physical hearing, physical speaking, and their accompanying emotions as somatically connected to current or remembered sensations in mouth, throat, and lungs.

Synopsis

This study undertakes to bring Shakespearean scholars and students alive to reading the plays and poetry with a much higher engagement of physical sense, body, and sense imagination than that to which we are usually accustomed. It builds upon a broadly based investigation of scientific literature concerning bodily perceptions and responses. Making Sense of Shakespeare also demonstrates its approach to reading and provides practical suggestions for students and teachers in pursuing sense reading.