Narcissism and Suicide in Shakespeare and his Contemporaries

Narcissism and Suicide in Shakespeare and his Contemporaries PDF Author: Eric Langley
Publisher: OUP Oxford
ISBN: 0191609188
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 326

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Book Description
The subjects of this book are the subjects whose subjects are themselves. Narcissus so himself himself forsook, And died to kiss his shadow in the brook. In accusing the introspective Adonis of narcissistic self-absorption, Shakespeare's Venus employs a geminative construction - 'himself himself' - that provides a keynote for this study of Renaissance reflexive subjectivity. Through close analysis of a number of Shakespearean texts - including Venus and Adonis, Romeo and Juliet, Julius Caesar, Hamlet, and Othello - his book illustrates how radical self-reflection is expressed on the Renaissance page and stage, and how representations of the two seemingly extreme figures of the narcissist and self-slaughterer are indicative of early-modern attitudes to introspection. Encompassing a broad range of philosophical, theological, poetic, and dramatic texts, this study examines period descriptions of the early-modern subject characterised by the rhetoric of reciprocation and reflection. The narcissist and the self-slaughter provide models of dialogic but self-destructive identity where private interiority is articulated in terms of self-response, but where this geminative isolation is understood as self-defeating, both selfish and suicidal. The study includes work on Renaissance revisions of Ovid, classical attitudes to suicide, the rhetoric of friendship literature, discussion of early-modern optic theory, and an extended discussion of narcissism in the epyllia tradition. Sustained textual analysis offers new readings of major Shakespearean texts, allowing familiar works of literature to be seen from the unusual and anti-social perspectives of their narcissistic and suicidal protagonists.

Narcissism and Suicide in Shakespeare and his Contemporaries

Narcissism and Suicide in Shakespeare and his Contemporaries PDF Author: Eric Langley
Publisher: OUP Oxford
ISBN: 0191609188
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 326

Get Book Here

Book Description
The subjects of this book are the subjects whose subjects are themselves. Narcissus so himself himself forsook, And died to kiss his shadow in the brook. In accusing the introspective Adonis of narcissistic self-absorption, Shakespeare's Venus employs a geminative construction - 'himself himself' - that provides a keynote for this study of Renaissance reflexive subjectivity. Through close analysis of a number of Shakespearean texts - including Venus and Adonis, Romeo and Juliet, Julius Caesar, Hamlet, and Othello - his book illustrates how radical self-reflection is expressed on the Renaissance page and stage, and how representations of the two seemingly extreme figures of the narcissist and self-slaughterer are indicative of early-modern attitudes to introspection. Encompassing a broad range of philosophical, theological, poetic, and dramatic texts, this study examines period descriptions of the early-modern subject characterised by the rhetoric of reciprocation and reflection. The narcissist and the self-slaughter provide models of dialogic but self-destructive identity where private interiority is articulated in terms of self-response, but where this geminative isolation is understood as self-defeating, both selfish and suicidal. The study includes work on Renaissance revisions of Ovid, classical attitudes to suicide, the rhetoric of friendship literature, discussion of early-modern optic theory, and an extended discussion of narcissism in the epyllia tradition. Sustained textual analysis offers new readings of major Shakespearean texts, allowing familiar works of literature to be seen from the unusual and anti-social perspectives of their narcissistic and suicidal protagonists.

Shakespeare’s Suicides

Shakespeare’s Suicides PDF Author: Marlena Tronicke
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351213172
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 357

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Book Description
Shakespeare’s Suicides: Dead Bodies That Matter is the first study in Shakespeare criticism to examine the entirety of Shakespeare’s dramatic suicides. It addresses all plays featuring suicides and near-suicides in chronological order from Titus Andronicus to Antony and Cleopatra, thus establishing that suicide becomes increasingly pronounced as a vital means of dramatic characterisation. In particular, the book approaches suicide as a gendered phenomenon. By taking into account parameters such as onstage versus offstage deaths, suicide speeches or the explicit denial of final words, as well as settings and weapons, the study scrutinises the ways in which Shakespeare appropriates the convention of suicide and subverts traditional notions of masculine versus feminine deaths. It shows to what extent a gendered approach towards suicide opens up a more nuanced understanding of the correlation between gender and Shakespeare’s genres and how, eventually, through their dramatisation of suicide the tragedies query normative gender discourse.

THE INFLUENCE OF PERSONALITY AND NARCISSISM ON THE PERFORMANCE OF SPORTS PERSONS

THE INFLUENCE OF PERSONALITY AND NARCISSISM ON THE PERFORMANCE OF SPORTS PERSONS PDF Author: Dr. Srinivas. S. K
Publisher: Ashok Yakkaldevi
ISBN: 1387737333
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 138

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Book Description
Sports psychologists work not only with the individual athlete but also with the team. How best to mild a group of individual athletes into a coherence team performing at its best is an ongoing question and challenge for coaches and team leaders. A knowledge of group dynamics, social perception how people perceive, think about, respond to each other, and individual differences in personality are all essential to motivating and leading a collection of athletes into a smoothly functioning team that makes the best use of each individual player's strengths

From Narcissism to Nihilism

From Narcissism to Nihilism PDF Author: Anthony Archdeacon
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000531589
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 220

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Book Description
This book explores how the myth of Narcissus, which is at once about self-love and self-destruction, desire and death, beauty and pain, became an ambivalent symbol of humanistic endeavour, and articulated the conflicts of early modern authorship. In early modern literature, there were expressions of humanistic self-congratulation that sometimes verged on narcissism, and at the same time expressions of self-doubt and anxiety that verged on nihilism. The themes of self-love and self-negation had a long history in western thought, and this book shows how the medieval treatments of the themes developed into something distinctive in the sixteenth century. The two themes, either individually or combined, encompass such topics as poverty, unrequited love, transgressive sexuality, sexual violence, suicidality, self-worth, authorship, religious penitence, martyrdom, courtly ambition and tyranny. Archdeacon uses over 100 texts from the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries to show how the early modern writer existed in a culture of contrary forces pulling towards either self-affirmation or self-erasure. Writers attempted to negotiate between the polarised extremes of self-love and self-negation, realising that they are fundamental to how we respond to each other, our selves and the world.

Theatres of Contagion

Theatres of Contagion PDF Author: Fintan Walsh
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1350085995
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 287

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Book Description
To what extent is theatre a contagious practice, capable of undoing and enlivening people and cultures? Theatres of Contagion responds to some of the anxieties of our current political and cultural climate by exploring theatre's status as a contagious cultural force, questioning its role in the spread or control of medical, psychological and emotional conditions and phenomena. Observing a diverse range of practices from the early modern to contemporary period, the volume considers how this contagion is understood to happen and operate, its real and imagined effects, and how these have been a source of pleasure and fear for theatre makers, audiences and authorities. Drawing on perspectives from medicine, neuroscience, psychology, anthropology, philosophy, law and affect theory, essays investigate some of the ways in which theatre can be viewed as a powerful agent of containment and transmission. Among the works analysed include a musical adaptation and an intercultural variation of Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet; a contemporary queer take on Hamlet; Grand Guignol and theatres of horror; the writings and influence of Artaud; immersive theatre and the work of Punchdrunk, and computer gaming and smartphone apps

Shakespeare, Spectatorship and the Technologies of Performance

Shakespeare, Spectatorship and the Technologies of Performance PDF Author: Pascale Aebischer
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108356095
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 259

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Book Description
Shakespeare, Spectatorship and the Technologies of Performance examines how rapid changes in performance technologies affect modes of spectatorship for early modern drama. It argues that seemingly disparate developments – such as the revival of early modern architectural and lighting technologies, digital performance technologies and the hybrid medium of theatre broadcast – are fundamentally related. How spectators experience performances is not only affected in medium-specific ways by particular technologies, but is also connected to the plays' roots in early modern performance environments. Aebischer's examples range from the use of candlelight and re-imagined early modern architecture, to set design, performance capture technologies, digital video, social media, hologram projection, biotechnologies and theatre broadcasts. This book argues that digital and analogue performance technologies alike activate modes of ethical spectatorship, requiring audiences to adopt an ethical standpoint as they decide how to look, where to look, what medium to look through, and how to take responsibility for looking.

Shakespeare and Early Modern Religion

Shakespeare and Early Modern Religion PDF Author: David Loewenstein
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 110702661X
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 331

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Book Description
This volume freshly illuminates the diversity of early modern religious beliefs, practices and issues, and their representation in Shakespeare's plays.

Shakespeare and Emotion

Shakespeare and Emotion PDF Author: Katharine A. Craik
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108245153
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 715

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Book Description
Shakespeare and Emotion devotes sustained attention to the emotions as a novel way of exploring Shakespeare's works in their original contexts. A variety of disciplinary approaches drawn from literary, theatrical, historical, cultural and film studies brings the recent upsurge of interest in affect into conversation with some of the most urgent debates in Shakespeare studies. The volume provides both a comprehensive account of the current state of scholarship and a speculative forum for new research. Its chapters outline some important contexts for understanding Shakespeare's creativity through an emotional lens – from religion, rhetoric, and medicine, to language, acting and Bollywood – and offer a range of case studies which reveal particular emotions at work. Considering emotional and passionate experience as an animating and sometimes alienating force within the plays and poems, the volume highlights the continuing importance of Shakespeare today: for our sense of who we are and who we might become.

Last Acts

Last Acts PDF Author: Maggie Vinter
Publisher: Fordham Univ Press
ISBN: 0823284271
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 305

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Book Description
Last Acts argues that the Elizabethan and Jacobean theater offered playwrights, actors, and audiences important opportunities to practice arts of dying. Psychoanalytic and new historicist scholars have exhaustively documented the methods that early modern dramatic texts and performances use to memorialize the dead, at times even asserting that theater itself constitutes a form of mourning. But early modern plays also engage with devotional traditions that understand death less as an occasion for suffering or grief than as an action to be performed, well or badly. Active deaths belie narratives of helplessness and loss through which mortality is too often read and instead suggest how marginalized and constrained subjects might participate in the political, social, and economic management of life. Some early modern strategies for dying resonate with descriptions of politicized biological life in the recent work of Giorgio Agamben and Roberto Esposito, or with ecclesiastical forms. Yet the art of dying is not solely a discipline imposed upon recalcitrant subjects. Since it offers suffering individuals a way to enact their deaths on their own terms, it discloses both political and dramatic action in their most minimal manifestations. Rather than mournfully marking what we cannot recover, the practice of dying reveals what we can do, even in death. By analyzing representations of dying in plays by Marlowe, Shakespeare, and Jonson, alongside devotional texts and contemporary biopolitical theory, Last Acts shows how theater reflects, enables, and contests the politicization of life and death.

Lucretius and Shakespeare on the Nature of Things

Lucretius and Shakespeare on the Nature of Things PDF Author: Richard Allen Shoaf
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN: 1443869538
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 165

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Book Description
Lucretius and Shakespeare on the Nature of Things maps large, new vistas for understanding the relationship between De rerum natura and Shakespeare’s works. In chapters on six important plays across the canon (King Lear, Macbeth, Hamlet, The Merchant of Venice, The Tempest, and A Midsummer Night’s Dream), it demonstrates that Shakespeare articulates his erotics of being, his “great creating nature” (The Winter’s Tale), by drawing on imagery he learned from Ovid and other classical poets, but especially from Lucretius, in his powerful epic that celebrates Venus and her endless creativity. Responding to Lucretius’s widely admired Latinity in his exposition of the life of man in nature, Shakespeare emerges as an early modern materialist who writes poetry that is effectively “atomic,” marked (as we might say today) by fission (hendiadys, for example) and fusion (synoeciosis, for example), joining and splitting, splitting and joining language and character as no other poet has ever done – To give away yourself keeps yourself still; My grave is like to be my wedding bed; I begin/To doubt the equivocation of the fiend/That lies like truth. Readers of Shoaf’s book will encounter anew, through both fresh evidence and close reading, Shakespeare’s universally acknowledged commitment to the art of nature and the nature of art. With Lucretius’s poetry as inspiration, Shakespeare becomes the poet of the material, both in art and in nature, immensely creative with his dædala lingua like dædala natura – his wonder-crafting tongue like wonder-working nature.