The Ritual and Rhetoric of A Midsummer Night's Dream

PMLA ◽  
1968 ◽  
Vol 83 (2) ◽  
pp. 380-391 ◽  
Author(s):  
James E. Robinson
Keyword(s):  
Social Conflict ◽  
The Other ◽  
Symbolic Sequence ◽  
Midsummer Night's Dream ◽  
Human Love ◽  
A Midsummer Night's Dream ◽  
The One

Two comic ideas inform the artistry of A Midsummer Night's Dream. The traditions of festival and ritual help to explain the one idea of celebrating man's quest for renewal in communion with nature and divinity; the traditions of Roman comedy and rhetoric help to explain the other, the idea of understanding man's folly in his quest for order in society. Shakespeare creates two contexts, finite society with its mores and laws, and nature with its transcendent gods, and then assimilates the two in the action and language of the play. The action combines a dialectical sequence based on social conflict and a symbolic sequence based on magic and myth. The language ranges between debate and song, argument and incantation. The gods of nature become both measure and mirror of the absurdity of human love, and the result is both satiric and celebrative: folly is understood as folly and celebrated as myth. Shakespeare's amusement at the artist's power through language to comprehend the relation of nature and experience and translate the comprehension into comic myth is apparent throughout. Bottom's wedding to Titania is summary of the comprehension and the play-within-a-play is a burlesque of the power.

A Note on the Four Chords in act II of A Midsummer Night's Dream

Tempo ◽  
1963 ◽  
pp. 36-37
Author(s):  
Eric Roseberry
Keyword(s):  
The Other ◽  
Midsummer Night's Dream ◽  
A Midsummer Night's Dream ◽  
Major Chord ◽  
The One

We know from the composer's own account that work on A Midsummer Night's Dream was by no means always easy going. Therefore when I accidentally stumbled (aurally, be it noted) upon the remarkable fact that the four chords used in Act II of the Dream were almost identical with those used in the setting of Keats's ‘Sonnet to Sleep’ in the Serenade I fully expected to learn that the composer had consciously borrowed from the earlier work, reversing the order of the first two chords (adding a B to the D major chord) and magically re-spacing and re-scoring them. As the poetic element in each piece is concerned with the properties of sleep (inducing a healing forgetfulness on the one hand, a fantastic change of identities on the other) the conscious re-working of those earlier chords of the Serenade would have seemed by no means inapt.

The Terminal Comma

2019 ◽  
pp. 189-220
Author(s):  
Oliver Morgan
Keyword(s):  
King Lear ◽  
The Other ◽  
Midsummer Night's Dream ◽  
Other Hand ◽  
A Midsummer Night's Dream ◽  
Turn Taking ◽  
The One ◽  
The Relationship

This chapter investigates the relationship between turn-taking and punctuation. On the one hand, punctuation seems to offer a way of resolving precisely those ambiguities over timing with which the second half of this book is concerned. On the other hand, the punctuation of Shakespeare’s texts is notoriously unreliable. No firm set of typographical conventions had yet evolved for the presentation of plays in print, and the punctuation they contain is more likely to be compositorial than authorial. In spite of these problems, the chapter argues for greater attention to punctuation at the ends of speeches and, in particular, to what it calls the ‘terminal comma’ in the early quartos of A Midsummer Night’s Dream and King Lear. Although largely ignored by editors and critics, these commas are often employed with a purpose and subtlety that is hard—but not impossible—to attribute to a compositor.

Epilogue

2018 ◽  
pp. 191-204
Author(s):  
Suparna Roychoudhury
Keyword(s):  
Cognitive Theory ◽  
The Other ◽  
Midsummer Night's Dream ◽  
A Midsummer Night's Dream ◽  
The Mind

Why has Shakespeare’s sensitivity to the cognitive discourse of imagination not been noticed before? In A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Theseus’ speech on imagination is followed by the play-within-play of “Pyramus and Thisbe” enacted by Bottom and the other “rude mechanicals”; it shows that Shakespeare was interested in the mechanical applications of imagination, its cognitive uses in playmaking. But this interest was obscured by Enlightenment and Romantic thinkers, who prized the fairies above the mechanicals: Shakespeare was remade from a man of the theater into a visionary poet; imagination was remade from a mechanism of the mind into a mystical force of creativity. It is time to recuperate the scientific and epistemological background of Shakespeare’s interest in imagination, whose crucial achievement was to bring the complexities of cognitive theory into the realm of art.

scholarly journals Teaching Material for Human Literacy: Multicultural-Charged Explanatory Text for Reducing Social Conflict

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ida Zulaeha ◽  
Wagiran Wagiran ◽  
Tomi Yuniawan
Keyword(s):  
Social Conflict ◽  
Group Discussion ◽  
Material Model ◽  
The Other ◽  
Teaching Material ◽  
Teaching Materials ◽  
Explanatory Text ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Younger Generation ◽  
The One

Languageisasocialphenomenonthatisnotseparatefromthespeakercommunity.The existence of text represents the speaker in various interaction functions. This research was conducted to produce Indonesian language material with multicultural content to reduce social conflict in the younger generation and optimize the implementation of the 2013 curriculum. The subject of this research is teaching materials for explanatory textsinwhichtherearerealmulticulturalvaluesinsociety.Researchdatawascollected through a focus group discussion between researchers and a number of Indonesian languageteachers.Thedevelopmentofafactualmodelwascarriedoutbyresearchers with a team of Indonesian Language lecturers with reference to the findings of the theoretical teaching material model. Indonesian teaching materials with multicultural content in reducing social conflict in the younger generation are developed in aspects of content, language, and presentation. The diversity of the Indonesian nation on the one hand has a positive value, but on the other hand it stores negative values that are unavoidable as innovations in the aspect of content. The diversity of the Indonesian peopleturnedouttobevulnerabletoactsofviolenceduetosocialconflict,especially intheyoungergeneration.Multiculturalawarenessisneededontheyounggeneration of Indonesia through learning Indonesian as a form of humanist literacy.

Emotions, Embodiment and the Sensation of Society

1997 ◽  
Vol 45 (2) ◽  
pp. 195-219 ◽  
Author(s):  
Chris Shilling
Keyword(s):  
Social Conflict ◽  
The Other ◽  
Gender Inequalities ◽  
Emile Durkheim ◽  
Important Resource ◽  
The Core ◽  
Contemporary Work ◽  
Core Questions ◽  
The One ◽  
Ongoing Project

The study of emotions has attracted an increased amount of attention from mainstream sociologists in recent years, both because of its potential to provide an added dimension to the analysis of such subjects as social conflict, gender inequalities and the organisation of the workplace, and as a result of its relevance to theoretical and methodological debates which have long characterised the discipline. This paper suggests that some of the core questions facing this subject can be interrogated productively by engaging critically with the work of one of the most important ‘founding figures’ of the discipline, Emile Durkheim. What Collins (1988) refers to as the ‘underground wing’ of Durkheim's work has yet to be fully utilised or developed by sociologists concerned with emotions, yet it provides us with a suggestive and provocative means of reconceptualising the gulf that often exists within contemporary work on emotions as malleable and controllable, on the one hand, and that concerned with emotions as intransigent ‘somatic states of being’, on the other. As such, Durkheim's writings constitute an important resource for sociologists concerned with the ongoing project of ‘embodying’ the discipline.

The Ideology and Practice of Contestation seen through Recent Events in France

1970 ◽  
Vol 5 (4) ◽  
pp. 410-429 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard Gombin
Keyword(s):  
Social Conflict ◽  
General Concept ◽  
The Other ◽  
Philosophical Reflection ◽  
Wildcat Strike ◽  
The One

THE NEW FORMS OF SOCIAL CONFLICT IN FRANCE AND THE IDEOLOGIES underlying them pose some formidable questions to the historian and the sociologist of the workers’ movement. Those which particularly interest us deal, on the one hand, with the existence of anarchist ideas and concepts within the sum total of ideological utterances in May and June 1968 and, on the other, with the libertarian character of the methods of contestation which have appeared in France during recent years. I have deliberately confined myself to the wide notion of the ‘practice of contestation’ precisely because it goes beyond the phenomenon of the wildcat strike or the unrest in the universities and corresponds to a more general concept which has not as yet been monopolized by any theory. ‘Generalized contestation’ does not claim to be a definitive sociological category. On the contrary, it is a provisional portmanteau word which will take a more definite shape once we emerge from the chiaroscuro of impressionistic criticism and philosophical reflection.

scholarly journals Psychoanalytic Reading of Love and Desire in Somerset Maugham’s Of Human Bondage

2017 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 58
Author(s):  
Amin Ettehadi ◽  
Roohollah Reesi Sistani
Keyword(s):  
The Other ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Main Character ◽  
Human Love ◽  
Gradual Loss ◽  
The One ◽  
The Relationship

<p><em>The present study was a comprehensive psychoanalysis of the idea of love and desire in Somerset Maugham’s Of Human Bondage. The study explored the relationship Philip Carey, the main character, develops with Other people throughout the novel. To further enrich the analysis, Lacan’s theory of human love and desire was employed to provide a psychoanalytic examination of Philip Carey’s bond of love for Mildred, on the one hand, and his gradual loss of identity in his desire towards her, on the other. The study inspected the nature of Philip’s desire for Mildred and shows how he turnd to a desiring subject in his bond to her and finally reached a state of selflessness and depended heavily on Mildred as the object of his desire which drove him towards self-contempt and a masochistic denial of real facts in his life.</em></p>

A Struggle with Alterity: A Lévinasian Reading of Macbeth

2020 ◽  
Vol 55 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-24
Author(s):  
Mehrdad Bidgoli ◽  
Shamsoddin Royanian
Keyword(s):  
William Shakespeare ◽  
Human Activities ◽  
Emmanuel Levinas ◽  
The Other ◽  
Julius Caesar ◽  
Midsummer Night's Dream ◽  
A Midsummer Night's Dream ◽  
History Play ◽  
The Way

AbstractIn Macbeth (ca. 1606), William Shakespeare returns all the way back to his metaphysics which he had demonstrated magnificently in A Midsummer Night’s Dream (ca. 1595) and Hamlet (ca. 1600). These works represent Shakespeare’s dramaturgical treatment of Being, substance, essence, etc. One of the chief elements of these plays is supernaturality, or nothingness (non-being) in a sense interrupting Being and human activities. These elements are presented in Julius Caesar (1599) as well, a history play which has commonalities with Macbeth. Yet few of his tragedies offer a world so dipped in horror and darkness as Macbeth. Ethics might thus be a far-fetched component among these grisly sensations and in the bloody atmosphere of this tragedy, but with the help of Emmanuel Lévinas (1906–1995), traces of ethical exigency can be discerned. Approaching Macbeth through Lévinas’s philosophy, we attempt to study some ways in which ethics can be addressed and studied in this dark world. We will discuss Macbeth’s struggles with time (mostly his future) and the Other as metaphors of alterity intruding into and interrupting his totalizing conatus.

Thither and Back Again

2019 ◽  
Vol 31 (4) ◽  
pp. 6-14
Author(s):  
Sue Emmy Jennings
Keyword(s):  
Special Needs ◽  
The Other ◽  
Children With Special Needs ◽  
Central Theme ◽  
Midsummer Night's Dream ◽  
Child Attachment ◽  
The World ◽  
A Midsummer Night's Dream ◽  
Other World ◽  
Culturally Embedded

In A Midsummer Night’s Dream, the experience of the other world is a central theme, symbolised by the world of the fairies. The play traces a journey from the rigid laws of the court to the seeming chaos of the forest to a return to a place of compromises. It is within the forest that several characters experience ‘other worldliness’; indeed, the forest itself becomes the other world. In my fieldwork with the Senoi Temiar peoples in Malaysia, there is also a belief in other world journeys. In addition to the other world, there are issues addressed in terms of applying Shakespeare with children with special needs as well as troubled teenagers and adults. I describe my own learning from the tribe in terms of understanding child attachment and development. Finally, I suggest that Shakespeare’s plays, in particular Dream, provide rites of healing. These are provided in other societies by their own culturally embedded rituals of healing.

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