Materialist Criticism and Cordelia's Quasi-Resurrection in King Lear

2007 ◽  
Vol 11 (3-4) ◽  
pp. 436-453 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sean Benson
Keyword(s):  
King Lear ◽  
Final Scene ◽  
Tangible Rewards ◽  
The Dead ◽  
First Folio ◽  
The Moment ◽  
Religious Understanding

AbstractThis essay examines King Lear's belief that the dead Cordelia revives or resuscitates near the very end of the play. This quasi-resurrection, which occurs only in the First Folio (1623), has divided critics into those who regard the moment as mere delusion and others who see it as adumbrating a moment of blessed release. Following a survey of these "redemptionist" versus the predominant nihilist-oriented readings of the play, I examine the influential materialist interpretations offered by Stephen Greenblatt and Jonathan Dollimore. Both insist that Cordelia's quasi-resurrection, since it never reaches fruition, frustrates a religious understanding of the play. (Materialist criticism only counts tangible rewards as meaningful.) The play, however, is more consistent with Hans-Georg Gadamer's view that tragedy overwhelms us with its suffering rather than promotes this-worldly justice. Cordelia's quasi-resurrection gestures towards a possible otherworldly redemption even as it reminds audiences of the Resurrection that, in Lear's pagan world, cannot be replicated. Shakespeare's anachronisms thus superimpose the Christian resurrectionary tradition on the pagan setting of the play; his doing so places the hope and despair of the final scene—the contrast between their transcendent aspirations and the mundane reality of their unresurrected corpses—in the delicate equipoise of his art.

Advantage, Affect, History, Henry V

PMLA ◽  
2003 ◽  
Vol 118 (3) ◽  
pp. 470-487 ◽  
Author(s):  
Donald Hedrick
Keyword(s):  
Henry V ◽  
Affective Labor ◽  
Final Scene ◽  
The Dead

Shakespeare's Henry V explores historiographic moments—relations among past, present, and future in memory, writing, and action. Advantage, Shakespeare's early capitalist term for highest return from least outlay, links historiography to war work, theater work, and love, theorized as “affective labor.” The play figures history not so much as fiction but rather in Walter Benjamin's terms as an achievement depending on the epistemic reliability of disadvantaged historians in danger, who rescue or recruit the dead and maximize affect. Falstaff's reported death reveals, through his friends' dispute about his dying words, Elizabethan and contemporary issues of history and shows lowliest characters with an unofficial authority appropriated also by Shakespeare's epilogue. In the controversial final scene, in which Henry woos the defeated French princess, circumstances and subtle conversational play show the labor of potential love—or hate. Henry is less successful, Catherine less victimized than they are usually interpreted to be, as she becomes the underdog Henry was before his victory, her body as mother in potentia constituting a dangerous future counterhistory and means by which domination may be dominated.

scholarly journals AN(OTHER) EPITAPH FOR TRIMALCHIO: SAT. 30.2

2014 ◽  
Vol 64 (1) ◽  
pp. 422-425
Author(s):  
Ulrike Roth
Keyword(s):  
Wall Paintings ◽  
Scholarly Discussion ◽  
The Dead ◽  
Dining Room ◽  
The Moment ◽  
Dead Man ◽  
Ring Composition ◽  
The Temple

Trimalchio's fabulous epitaph, recited in full by Petronius’ colourful host towards the end of the Cena (Sat. 71.12), has long attracted abundant comment. Similarly, allusions to the underworld in much of the decoration leading to and in Trimalchio's dining room have been the object of intense scholarly discussion of the freedman's morbid characterization. In consequence, it is now accepted that epitaph and funereal allusions make for a deliberate mirage of the netherworld – so much so that ‘… Trimalchio's home is in some sense to be regarded as a house of the dead’. As John Bodel has shown, ‘Petronius signalled his intention to portray Trimalchio's home as an underworld earlier in the episode’. Examples for this include the procession from the baths to Trimalchio's house that preceded the banquet (Sat. 28.4–5) – ‘resembling nothing so much as a Roman cortege’, and the wall paintings in the porticus of Trimalchio's house which made Encolpius stop and pause, as Aeneas had done at the Temple of Apollo at Cumae (Sat. 29.1). The example of the pairing of the Cerberus-like watchdog encountered by Encolpius and friends during their escape (Sat. 72.7) and the painted dog in Trimalchio's vestibule that frightened Encolpius upon his arrival (Sat. 29.1) makes it moreover clear that Petronius engaged in some elaborate ring composition concerning Trimalchio's portrayal as a dead man walking. It is surprising, then, that Petronius should have failed to square the circle as regards Trimalchio's epitaph: Sat. 71.12 appears to lack an earlier match – and this despite the fact that a visitor to a Roman tomb might well expect to be informed about the name of the deceased, and perhaps a few other details, at the moment of entering the tomb.

‘Your memorials shall survive the grave’: elegy and remembrance

2018 ◽  
pp. 118-149
Author(s):  
Alison Morgan
Keyword(s):  
Central Feature ◽  
Self Awareness ◽  
The Public ◽  
Vernacular Culture ◽  
The Future ◽  
Broadside Ballads ◽  
The Dead ◽  
The Moment ◽  
The Way

The sixteen ballads and songs within this section fall into two camps: elegy and remembrance. Whilst a central feature of elegiac poetry is the way in which it remembers or memorialises the dead, the dead a poem which is one of remembrance is not necessarily an elegy. Several of the songs herein use the date of Peterloo as a temporal marker – with an eye both on the contemporaneous reader or audience and the future reader. Included in this section are broadside ballads by Michael Wilson and elegies by Samuel Bamford and Peter Pindar. These songs display a self-awareness in their significance in marking the moment for posterity and in their attempts to reach an audience beyond Manchester and ensure that the public knew what had happened on 16th August as well as preserving the event in English vernacular culture. It is also a quest for ownership of the narrative of the day; the speed with which so many of these songs were written and published not only suggests the ferocity of emotions surrounding events but also the need to exert some control over the way in which they were represented.

Narrative Structure

2017 ◽  
pp. 39-56
Author(s):  
Giulia Miller
Keyword(s):  
False Memory ◽  
Narrative Structure ◽  
Total Recall ◽  
Final Scene ◽  
The Moment ◽  
Real Truth

This chapter is concerned with the narrative structure of Ari Folman's Waltz with Bashir. It reflects on the differences between Waltz with Bashir's story and plot, as defined by David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson in their seminal text Film Art: An Introduction and looks at how information is revealed to the audience. It also looks at the ten animated interview scenes ordered around in Waltz with Bashir, which allegedly took place in 2006 and are carried out as part of an investigation to help the film's narrator-protagonist to overcome his amnesia about his role during the First Lebanon War. The chapter analyzes Waltz with Bashir's final scene that uses live news footage of the Sabra and Shatila camps and appears to mark the moment when the protagonist is hit by the full emotional force of his memories. It talks about the juxtaposition of live footage with total recall that suggests that Waltz with Bashir moves from unreliable or 'false' memory to 'real' truth.

Sacralising Bodies On Martyrdom, Government and Accident in Iran

2010 ◽  
Vol 20 (4) ◽  
pp. 441-460 ◽  
Author(s):  
RAVINDER KAUR
Keyword(s):  
Human Error ◽  
Thick Layer ◽  
News Daily ◽  
Technical Problems ◽  
Plane Crash ◽  
The Dead ◽  
The Government ◽  
Original Narrative ◽  
The Moment ◽  
The Revolution

AbstractIn post-revolution Iran, the sacred notion of martyrdom has been transformed into a routine act of government – a moral sign of order and state sovereignty. Moving beyond the debates of the secularisation of the sacred and the making sacred of the secular, this article argues that the moment of sacralisation is realised through co-production within a social setting when the object of sacralisation is recognised as such by others. In contemporary Iran, however, the moment of sacralising bodies by the state is also the moment of its own subversion as the political-theological field of martyrdom is contested and challenged from within. This article traces the genealogy of martyrdom in contemporary Iran in order to explore its institutionalised forms and governmental practices. During the revolution, the Shi'a tradition of martyrdom and its dramatic performances of ritual mourning and self-sacrifice became central to the mass mobilisation against the monarchy. Once the revolutionary government came into existence, this sacred tradition was regulated to create ‘martyrs’ as a fixed category, in order to consolidate the legacy of the revolution. In this political theatre, the dead body is a site of transformation and performance upon which the original narrative of martyrdom takes place even as it displaces it and gives new meanings to the act.A CrashOn the morning of 6 December 2005, an Iranian military plane C-130 carrying journalists and Army officials crashed near Mehrabad airport in Tehran. The plane was attempting an emergency landing when it hit a ten-storey apartment block, setting off a big explosion which set fire to the building. In all, one hundred and sixteen charred bodies were recovered – ninty four passengers and twenty two residents of the building – from the smoke and rubble in this working class area of south-western Tehran. The residents were mostly women and schoolchildren who had stayed home – because of an official anti-pollution drive – to avoid a thick layer of smog that had developed over Tehran skies over the previous few days. Dozens of people were injured on the ground and the riot police had to be called in to clear the area of curious onlookers who were blocking the emergency services.The plane crash was met with grief, guilt and hints of anger. The Iranian media was most vocal in its expression of rage – seventy eight journalists had lost their lives in an instant. The ‘Iran News Daily’, a leading English language newspaper based in Tehran, two days later devoted a full page to the crash coverage including scathing editorials demanding accountability and answers to “disturbing questions” from the government. The editorial entitled ‘Duty and Responsibility’ stated that “condolences are not enough. People, the near and dear ones of victims in particular, have the right to know. Did the C-130 have technical problems? Was it fit for the passenger service? What would have really happened if the flight was cancelled? Who gave the final permission for the journey to go ahead? Is this another case of human error or engine failure? How can such major loss of innocent life be explained, leave [sic] alone justified?”2Similarly, Hossein Shariatmadari, influential editor of the conservative Persian daily ‘Kayhan’, called for a full investigation, not because it would bring “the dead back to life but (to) prevent repetition of similar incidents and further disasters”.3As private and public condolences began pouring in – newspapers had allocated prime space for such purpose – President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad sent a short message through state media that dramatically altered the narrative of grief and anger against the authorities. The message read as follows: “I learned of the catastrophe and the fact that members of the press have been martyred. I offer my condolences to the Supreme Leader and to the families of the victims”. With this message the dead journalists had been officially pronounced ‘martyrs’ – a moral-political subjectivity that traces its genealogy to the martyrdom of Imam Hussein.4In a single moment, the burnt corpses were no longer the bodies of ordinary victims of a plane crash, but the corpses of martyrs, and their charred remains sacrificial relics.

scholarly journals Touch, Transcendence and Immanence in Film

2009 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrew Murphie
Keyword(s):  
Gilles Deleuze ◽  
Philosophical Discussion ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Dead ◽  
The Moment

TAKING OFF THE GLOVES: TOUCH, TRANSCENDENCE AND IMMANENCE IN FILM Beginning with excessive acts of both violence and compassion, as depicted in Martin Scorsese's Bring out the Dead (1999, USA), I attempt to sketch the play between transcendence and immanence in film. In particular, I am interested in Paul Schrader's philosophical discussion of "transcendental style", as well as his film work, and in the work of Scorsese, Yasujiro Ozu, and Gilles Deleuze concerning the film relations between transcendence and immanence. In the process I hope to foreground the role of touch in film and begin to question an aesthetic syntax in film and in philosophy. In a way the moment of bashing and compassion in Bringing Out the Dead that I shall begin with crystallises a history of ambiguity and anxiety surrounding issues of touch, immanence and transcendence. I shall try and tease out only a few moments in...

scholarly journals Olga Tokarczuk’s Game with the Rules of Criminal Novels: The Case of “Plough Through the Bones of the Dead”

2013 ◽  
Vol 24 (29) ◽  
pp. 98-107
Author(s):  
Anna Wzorek
Keyword(s):  
Daily Life ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
Detective Novels ◽  
The World ◽  
The Dead ◽  
The Moment

This article presents the game Olga Tokarczuk plays with criminal narration as based on her novel, Plough Through the Bones of the Dead (2009). The main problem is that this famous writer, recipient of numerous prestigious awards, here disregards a series of “iron” rules that have guided detective novels for ages to write a pastiche of a criminal novel. The analysis reveals that Tokarczuk retreats from common frameworks of criminal novels, only making a delicate reference to the problem of an “island.” The writer also discards the rule that a murder has to be the starting point for the criminal plot. She not only delays the moment of introduction of the criminal motive, but also, contrary to the abovementioned “iron” rules, avoids presenting the prerequisites necessary to unmask the criminal. She is far more interested in the daily life of the protagonist/narrator than in the circumstances surrounding the four murders. In the world created by Tokarczuk, there is no detective who conducts an investigation. At the end of this quasi-criminal novel, the very perpetrator discloses the secret of the mysterious deaths. Tokarczuk’s rather free attitude toward the rules of the criminal novel is also manifested in her choice to leave the murderer unpunished. Moreover, the author introduces an improbable method of crime. In Plough Through the Bones of the Dead—a title which also provides proof that this is a pastiche of a criminal novel—one will not find any references to classical criminal novels, but quotations from William Blake’s mystic poetry.

THE DEAD STILL AMONG US: VICTORIAN SECULAR RELICS, HAIR JEWELRY, AND DEATH CULTURE

2010 ◽  
Vol 39 (1) ◽  
pp. 127-142 ◽  
Author(s):  
Deborah Lutz
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Walter Benjamin ◽  
The Other ◽  
Shared Experience ◽  
The Public ◽  
Look Back ◽  
The Dead ◽  
Death Culture ◽  
The Moment

By the time the nineteenth centuryreached its close, it was already possible to look back at Victorian death culture with nostalgia. With the rise of secularism, the slide toward what Diana Fuss has called the death of death had begun. No longer was it common practice to hold onto the remains of the dead. Rarely would a lock of hair be kept by, to be worn as jewelry, nor did one dwell on the deathbed scene, linger upon the lips of the dying to mark and revere those last words, record the minutiae of slipping away in memorials, diaries, and letters. Rooms of houses were increasingly less likely to hold remains; no one had died in the beds in which the living slept. Walter Benjamin, who wrote often about what was lost in the nineteenth century, sees the turning away from death as going hand in hand with the disappearance of the art of storytelling. Writing in the early 1930s, he called his contemporaries “dry dwellers of eternity” because “today people live in rooms that have never been touched by death” (Illuminations94). Avoiding the sight of the dying, Benjamin argues, one misses the moment when life becomes narrative, when the meaning of life is completed and illuminated in its ending. He privileges the shared moment of death, when relatives, and even the public, gather around the dying to glean final words of wisdom, to know perhaps, in the end, the whole story. Historian of death Philippe Ariès describes a Christian account of the final ordeal of the death bed, when in the moment of death the salvation or damnation of the dying is determined, thus changing or freezing, for good, the meaning of the whole life. Scholars of nineteenth- and twentieth-century death culture tend, on the whole, to agree that towards the end of the century, a process that began earlier reached a completion – that the death of the other not only became less of a shared experience among a community, but last things such as final words and remains were increasingly to be pushed to the back of consciousness and hence to the lumber room of meaning and importance.

Performing Natural Folly: the Jests of Lean Leanard and the Touchstones of Robert Armin and David Tennant

2006 ◽  
Vol 22 (2) ◽  
pp. 141-154 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter Cockett
Keyword(s):  
King Lear ◽  
As You Like It ◽  
History Of ◽  
First Folio ◽  
The University ◽  
Mcmaster University

Robert Armin, one of the ‘principal actors’ of Shakespeare’s plays named in the First Folio, probably joined the Lord Chamberlain’s Men in 1599 to take the place of Will Kempe as the company’s clown; and it was for him that Shakespeare wrote the parts of Touchstone, Feste, and the Fool in King Lear. Received wisdom, in part extrapolated from the nature of Armin’s roles, sees him as a more serious, even morose character than his predecessor, and he took his clowning seriously enough to write a book on ‘natural’ fools, Foole Upon Foole (1600), in addition to some minor verse, and a play, The History of the Two Maids of More-clacke, whence the only known illustration of him in performance derives. Although virtually disregarded by critics as little more than a jest book, Foole Upon Foole was also, argues Peter Cockett, a serious attempt to survey the variety of qualities and conditions of natural folly. It not only reveals much about Armin’s likely approach to his roles, but questions the conventional distinctions between the natural and the artificial fool. With close reference to Armin’s description of one of his subjects, Lean Leanard, Peter Cockett compares what this tells us about Armin’s possible approach to the role of Touchstone with the problems faced by the actor, David Tennant, in the RSC As You Like It of 1996. The author is a professional actor who emigrated to Canada in 1994. He now teaches acting and directing at McMaster University, Ontario, and is working with the University of Toronto’s medieval and renaissance players on a two-year project on the work and repertoire of the Queen’s Men.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document