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by Sanford Budick (Author)
Philosophers speak of newly accessed ways of knowing reality as epistemological shifts. This book demonstrates how Shakespeare effected a massive shift of just this kind in his bold management of theatricalisation itself. These pages levy on terms of Kant and Husserl that they elaborated in proposals for such shifts. It will be seen that Shakespeare exceeds the proposals of the philosophers. He anticipates and already brings to a working consummation a systematic and immediate access to the ways of knowing reality that they contemplate as hoped-for desiderata. In, and through, the drama of consciousness played out in the pairs of plays examined here, the playwright and the spectator together - intersubjectively - attain to an 'onlooker' consciousness that exits the fictionality, the play-acting, of theatricalisation; and they are enabled to recover the actuality of objects in their worlds.
Author Biography
Sanford Budick is Professor of English at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, where he founded the Center for Literary Studies. He was formerly Professor of English at Cornell University. He has published six monographs, two of which won the Hanford Award (for best book) of the Milton Society; edited three collections of essays on key issues in literary studies (one with Geoffrey Hartman, two with Wolfgang Iser); and been awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship and a Fellowship of the U.S. National Endowment for the Humanities
