Hazarding All: Shakespeare and the Drama of Consciousness - Paperback

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 is formerly Professor of English, Cornell University. His books include The Western Theory of Tradition (Yale UP) and Kant and Milton (Harvard UP). With Geoffrey Hartman, he edited Midrash and Literature (Yale UP); with Wolfgang Iser, he edited Languages of the Unsayable (Columbia UP, reprinted Stanford UP).