Author: Cynthia Marshall File Type: pdf In The Shattering of the Self Violence, Subjectivity, and Early Modern Texts, Cynthia Marshall reconceptualizes the place and function of violence in Renaissance literature. During the Renaissance an emerging concept of the autonomous self within art, politics, religion, commerce, and other areas existed in tandem with an established, popular sense of the self as fluid, unstable, and volatile. Marshall examines an early modern fascination with erotically charged violence to show how texts of various kinds allowed temporary release from an individualism that was constraining. Scenes such as Gloucesters blinding and Cordelias death in King Lear or the dismemberment and sexual violence depicted in Titus Andronicus allowed audience members not only a release but a shatteringas opposed to an affirmationof the self.Marshall draws upon close readings of Shakespearean plays, Petrarchan sonnets, John Foxes Acts and Monuments of the Christian Martyrs, and John Fords The Broken Heart to successfully address questions of subjectivity, psychoanalytic theory, and identity via a cultural response to art. Timely in its offering of an account that is both historically and psychoanalytically informed, The Shattering of the Self argues for a renewed attention to the place of fantasy in this literature and will be of interest to scholars working in Renaissance and early modern studies, literary theory, gender studies, and film theory.ReviewMarshall effectively brings to our attention the variety of ways in which late-sixteenth- and early-seventeenth-century texts successfully exploited means to debunk the emergent concept of selfhood... An original and stimulating contribution to the field of Renaissance studies, offering insights that go far beyond the boundaries of a specific discipline.(Antonella Dalla Torre Renaissance Quarterly 2004)In this interesting study of violence in early modern English drama, Marshall sets out to demonstrate how these texts offer their audiences an experience of psychic fracture that results from conflicting yet coexistent perceptions of subjectivity.(Choice 2003)Brilliantly employing the insights of Freudian, Lacanian and post-Lacanian psychoanalysis in a series of close textual readings, Marshall demonstrates the early modern selfs desire for self-dissolution in the rough textual pleasures of jouissance and connects that desire with contemporary interest in the ethics of pornography and other violent forms of spectatorship. This is a study of major importance to which I will turn again and again.(Gail Kern Paster, George Washington University, Editor, Shakespeare Quarterly )Cynthia Marshalls brilliant and challenging book investigates the perverse pleasure catered by some of the most violent texts of the early modern period. At once deploying and strongly taking issue with mainstream New Historicism, Marshall provokes wide-ranging reconsideration of the dynamics of early modern literary production and audience-response.(Jonathan V. Crewe, Dartmouth College )Scholarly, wonderfully wise, detailed and painful.(Bob J. Barker )Marshall leaves her own readers with a rich sense of what it may have meant, and may still mean, to lose oneself in the violent pleasures of Renaissance textuality.(Patricia A. Cahill Modern Philology 2005)Elegant book... the books reach goes beyond studies of the early modern period.(Tzachi Zamir Partial Answers 2007) From the PublisherBrilliantly employing the insights of Freudian, Lacanian and post-Lacanian psychoanalysis in a series of close textual readings, Marshall demonstrates the early modern selfs desire for self-dissolution in the rough textual pleasures of jouissance and connects that desire with contemporary interest in the ethics of pornography and other violent forms of spectatorship. This is a study of major importance to which I will turn again and again.Gail Kern Paster, George Washington University, Editor, Shakespeare Quarterly Cynthia Marshalls brilliant and challenging book investigates the perverse pleasure catered by some of the most violent texts of the early modern period. At once deploying and strongly taking issue with mainstream New Historicism, Marshall provokes wide-ranging reconsideration of the dynamics of early modern literary production and audience-response.Jonathan V. Crewe, Dartmouth College

Author: Laurence Lampert File Type: epub When Nietzsche published Beyond Good and Evil in 1886, he told a friend that it was a book that would not be read properly until around the year 2000. Now Laurence Lampert sets out to fulfill this prophecy by providing a section by section interpretation of this philosophical masterpiece that emphasises its unity and depth as a comprehensive new doctrine on nature and humanity. According to Lampert, Nietzsche begins with a critique of philosophy that is ultimately affirmative, because it shows how philosophy can arrive at a defensible ontological account of the way of all beings. Nietzsche next argues that a new post-Christian religion can arise out of the affirmation of the world disclosed to philosophy. Then, turning to the implications of the new ontology for morality and politics, Nietzsche argues that these can be reconstituted on the fundamental insights of the new philosophy. Nietzsches comprehensive depiction of this anti-Platonic philosophy ends with a chapter on nobility, in which he contends that what can now be publicly celebrated as noble in our species are its highest achievements of mind and spirit.**