Items related to Hamlet and the Rethinking of Man
This study illumines the intellectual dynamics of the play - the processes by which received constructions that define the human project, and confer substance and direction on the striving of the human individual, undergo critique and transformation. Underpinning this dynamic is a reconsideration of reason - the defining attribute of humanity - with the result that thinking itself is rethought. That is, as this investigation demonstrates, Hamlet dramatizes an intellectual revolution whereby rationality - construed as the deployment of concepts in the act of determining truth or action - critiques, shatters, and transcends the relevant Aristotelian-Thomist and other paradigms, even as it invokes and relies on them. Thinking - the act of rendering experience intelligible in terms of meaning and purpose - is under siege in the world of the play, at bottom because inherited modes of construing reality and the role of "the single and peculiar life" in it are being questioned and displaced (3.3.11).
This matter can be clarified by Hamlet's question, "what is a man" (4.4.33). In classical definition, man is a rational animal. That is, a human individual is a human individual only through the faculty of rationality that, in turn, constitutes the specific difference - the unique quality - distinguishing the human species - man - from all other species in the genus, animal. But as defining attribute, rationality entails moral task. For in this dispensation, the highest responsibility of the human individual is to manifest proper operation of the faculty by which he or she is an individual. As a play, Hamlet investigates the problem of human identity by invoking and challenging concepts central to the Christian-humanist and other interpretations of rationality. The result is a new formulation of the meaning of being human, but one still founded on the notion that human individuality must be construed in relation to the faculty of reason.
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About the Author:
Eric P. Levy is Associate Professor at The University of British Columbia. He is the author of Beckett and the Voice of Species: A Study of the Prose Fiction and Trapped in Thought: A Study of the Beckettian Mentality, as well as fifty-five articles on topics and texts pertaining to Twentieth Century American Literature, Renaissance British Literature, Victorian British Literature, Twentieth-Century British and Irish Literature, and other subjects, including one article on Christology. His work has earned seventeen republications in anthologies and critical studies.
Review:
If the human individual is characterized above all by the capacity to think, then `what happens in Hamlet,' Eric P. Levy argues, `concerns a redefining of what is a man, through interrogation and reinterpretation of the faculty of reason through which man is man.' Hamlet and the Rethinking of Man problematizes the play's Christian humanist and Aristotelian-Thomist contexts in order to situate Hamlet `within the constitutive processes and principles of conceptualization.' Levy's analysis is concerned less with human cognitive patterns than with the impact that the disruption of those patterns has on the development of individual subjectivity in Hamlet. He convincingly demonstrates how a reconsideration of the faculty of reason helps to reveal the complexity of the conceptual processes and the dynamic intersections among knowledge, thought, and action that inform the play.
Over the course of the book's eleven succinct chapters, Levy revisits key moments in Hamlet - the `To be or not to be' soliloquy, Hamlet's closet encounters with Gertrude and Ophelia, the stabbing of Polonius, the performance of The Murder of Gonzago, the Ghost's appearances - in order to illuminate them from multiple perspectives. Levy characterizes his approach as a version of `tomography, which examines cross sections of tissue at varying depths, along distinct axes, and from different points of view.' While the decision to re-examine specific passages and dramatic moments over the course of a study risks repetition and redundancy, Levy succeeds in developing a `three-dimensional representation' of the conceptual processes informing the play that becomes richer and - like Polonius's cloud shifting from camel to weasel to whale - reveals new facets with each successive reading. Uniting these case studies is a focus on the conflicts and collisions that inform the conceptualization of identity and action in Hamlet, whether between practical and speculative reason (chapters 3 and 4), passivity and opportunism (chapter 5), knowledge and ignorance (chapter 6), reason and emotion (chapter 7), reiterative and teleological time (chapter 8), subjunctive and indicative moods (chapter 9), or inward and outward manifestations of personhood (chapter 11). As the book progresses, Levy also draws attention to the broader tensions that contribute to Hamlet's epistemological trajectory; dreams, madness, death, and the `divinity that shapes our ends, / Rough-hew them how we will' continually threaten the sovereignty and self-control of the thinking individual. By examining how the play problematizes the `appropriate exercise of reason' from these divergent perspectives, Levy brings Hamlet's `urgent search for knowledge' into sharper focus and helps to unpack the cruxes of Hamlet's ambivalence and delays....(Katherine R. Larson) --University of Toronto Quarterly, Volume 79, Number 1, Winter 2010
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- PublisherFairleigh Dickinson University Press
- Publication date2008
- ISBN 10 0838641393
- ISBN 13 9780838641392
- BindingHardcover
- Edition number1
- Number of pages256
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