Overview
"Word against Word offers a new approach to Shakespearean drama - in particular Shakespeare's Richard II - through an extended engagement with the Bakhtinian concept of art as a form of social utterance. The book is the first to explore this central Bakhtinian conception and its associated notions of social accent, dialogism, and heteroglossia in the context of drama and of Shakespeare studies." James R. Siemon begins by examining the variety of accents, discourses, and behaviors that competed for the social space of early modern England. He surveys Shakespeare and his contemporaries, including dramatists, poets, and other writers, in order to document early modern attitudes toward the implications of sociolinguistic behavior in a heteroglot environment. While ranging broadly, the book takes Richard II as an exemplary instance of Bakhtinian utterance, showing the play to be, despite its apparent thematic and formal unities, an arena marked by struggles among competing groups and orientations, with their socially defined languages and assumptions. The figure of Shakespeare's King Richard emerges as a revealing example of a form of subjectivity constructed amid the demands of conflicting voices.Synopsis
Applies the work of M. M. Bakhtin and his circle to the study of Shakespearean drama and its cultural contexts. A volume in the series Massachusetts Studies in Early Modern Culture.
Library Journal
Russian scholar Bakhtin developed a theory of literary criticism based on the concept that language evolves through interaction between the individual and society. Here, Siemon (English, Boston Univ.; Shakespearean Iconoclasm) devotes less of his text to providing literary commentary on Shakespeare's Richard II than to creating a dialog between the voices of Bakhtin and Shakespeare and testing the usefulness of Bakhtin's theories of dialogics and sociolingual interorientations in the context of Shakespearean drama. Additionally, Siemon surveys the works of Shakespeare's contemporaries to identify 16th-century attitudes toward sociolinguistic behavior. The text is dense, and readers need a basic knowledge of such concepts as formalism, pragmatics, historicism, heteroglossia, and sociolinguistic interpretation-or a good literary dictionary. A search of World Cat indicates that this is the only text currently available applying Bakhtin's critical theories to Shakespearean drama. Recommended for academic libraries serving masters and doctoral programs.-Shana C. Fair, Ohio Univ. Lib., Zanesville Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information.