Generosity and the Limits of Authority: Shakespeare, Herbert, MiltonGenerosity is an ambiguous quality, William Flesch observes; while receiving gifts is pleasant, gift-giving both displays the wealth and strength of the giver and places the receiver under an obligation. In provocative new readings of Shakespeare, Herbert, and Milton, Flesch illuminates the personal authority that is bound inextricably with acts of generosity. Drawing on the work of such theorists as Mauss, Blanchot, Bourdieu, Wittgenstein, Bloom, Cavell, and Greenblatt, Flesch maintains that the literary power of Shakespeare, Herbert, and Milton is at its most intense when they are exploring the limits of generosity. He considers how in Herbert's Temple divine assurance of the possibility of redemption is put into question and how the poet approaches such a gift with the ambivalence of a beneficiary. In his readings of Shakespeare's Richard II, Henry IV, King Lear, Antony and Cleopatra, and the sonnets, Flesch examines the perspective of the benefactor—including Shakespeare himself—who confronts the decline of his capacity to give. Turning to Milton's Paradise Lost, Flesch identifies two opposing ways of understanding generosity—Satan's, on the one hand, and Adam and Eve's, on the other - and elaborates the different conceptions of poetry to which these understandings give rise. Scholars of Shakespeare and of Renaissance culture, Miltonists, literary theorists, and others interested in the relationship between philosophy and literature will want to read this insightful and challenging book. |
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... Blanchot than like Stanley Fish. By focusing on someone as worldly and as antimetaphysical as the late Wittgenstein I hope to show the inevitability of Blanchot's characterization of the unworldliness of solitude. Thus my argument makes ...
... its own fragility? I think the answer that a philosophy like Wittgenstein's or Cavell's will give can finally lead to literary insight similar, perhaps surprisingly, to Maurice Blanchot's. One of the subsidiary purposes of this book is to.
... Blanchot have a great deal in common, from the hypnotic severity of their style to their analysis of such states as expectation or grief as being something other than the simple experience of sensation: Can only those hope who can talk ...
... Blanchot have in common primarily an unflagging attentiveness to the fragility of human participation in language and life. Literature may be able to urge this fragility as its own cure. The world is necessarily fragile, and so ...
... Blanchot describes the impersonal or the neutral as the space beyond the world. In L'espace littéraire he approaches this space through his discussion of the impersonality of death; but in all his work (especially his fiction) he ...
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Generosity and the Limits of Authority: Shakespeare, Herbert, Milton William Flesch Limited preview - 2018 |