Posthuman Lear: Reading Shakespeare in the Anthropocene /

Approaching King Lear from an eco-materialist perspective, Posthuman Lear examines how the shift in Shakespeare's tragedy from court to stormy heath activates a different sense of language as tool-being -- from that of participating in the flourish of aristocratic prodigality and circumstance,...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Author: Dionne, Craig (Author)
Format: Electronic eBook
Language:English
Published: Baltimore, Maryland : Project Muse, 2020
Series:Book collections on Project MUSE.
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Online Access:Full text available:
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100 1 |a Dionne, Craig,  |e author. 
245 1 0 |a Posthuman Lear: Reading Shakespeare in the Anthropocene /   |c by Craig Dionne. 
264 1 |a Baltimore, Maryland :  |b Project Muse,  |c 2020 
264 3 |a Baltimore, Md. :  |b Project MUSE,   |c 2020 
264 4 |c ©2020 
300 |a 1 online resource (202 pages):   |b illustrations 
336 |a text  |b txt  |2 rdacontent 
337 |a computer  |b c  |2 rdamedia 
338 |a online resource  |b cr  |2 rdacarrier 
500 |a Issued as part of book collections on Project MUSE. 
504 |a Includes bibliographical references (pages 199-213) and index. 
505 0 |a Introduction: this is the thing -- Listening to the past; or; how to speak to the future? -- Lear and the proverbial reflex -- Accessorizing King Lear in the anthropocene -- Coda: Lear's receding world. 
506 0 |a Open Access  |f Unrestricted online access  |2 star 
520 |a Approaching King Lear from an eco-materialist perspective, Posthuman Lear examines how the shift in Shakespeare's tragedy from court to stormy heath activates a different sense of language as tool-being -- from that of participating in the flourish of aristocratic prodigality and circumstance, to that of survival and pondering one's interdependence with a denuded world. Dionne frames the thematic arc of Shakespeare's tragedy about the fall of a king as a tableaux of our post-sustainable condition. For Dionne, Lear's progress on the heath works as a parable of flat ontology.At the center of Dionne's analysis of rhetoric and prodigality in the tragedy is the argument that adages and proverbs, working as embodied forms of speech, offer insight into a nonhuman, fragmentary mode of consciousness. The Renaissance fascination with memory and proverbs provides an opportunity to reflect on the human as an instance of such enmeshed being where the habit of articulating memorized patterns of speech works on a somatic level. Dionne theorizes how mnemonic memory functions as a potentially empowering mode of consciousness inherited by our evolutionary history as a species, revealing how our minds work as imprinted machines to recall past prohibitions and useful affective scripts to aid in our interaction with the environment. The proverb is that linguistic inscription that defines the equivalent of human-animal imprinting, where the past is etched upon collective memory within 'adagential' being that lives on through the generations as autonomic cues for survival.Dionne's reimagining of this tragedy is important in the way it places Shakespeare's central existential questions -- the meaning of familial love, commitments to friends, our place in a secular world -- in a new relation to the main question of surviving within fixed environmental limits. Along the way, Dionne reflects on the larger theoretical implications of recycling the old historicism of early modern culture to speak to an eco-materialism, and why the modernist textual aesthetics of the self-distancing text seems inadequate when considering the uncertainty and trauma that underscores life in a post-sustainable culture. Dionne's final appeal is to "repurpose" our fatalism in the face of ecological disaster. 
588 |a Description based on print version record. 
600 1 0 |a Shakespeare, William,  |d 1564-1616  |x History and criticism. 
600 1 0 |a Shakespeare, William,  |d 1564-1616.  |t King Lear. 
650 0 |a Ecocriticism. 
655 7 |a Electronic books.   |2 local 
710 2 |a Project Muse,  |e distributor. 
776 1 8 |i Print version:  |z 9780692641576 
710 2 |a Project Muse.  |e distributor 
830 0 |a Book collections on Project MUSE. 
856 4 0 |z Full text available:   |u https://muse.jhu.edu/book/76498/ 
999 |c 234340  |d 234339