Staging the Gaze : : Postmodernism, Psychoanalysis, and Shakespearean Comedy / / Barbara Freedman.

• Superior document: Title is part of eBook package: De Gruyter Cornell University Press Archive Pre-2000
• VerfasserIn: Freedman, Barbara,
• Place / Publishing House: Ithaca, NY : : Cornell University Press, , [2019]; ©1991
• Year of Publication: 2019
• Language: English
• Physical Description: 1 online resource (264 p.) :; 12 halftones

Challenging the idea that one can apply postmodern theory or psychoanalysis to Shakespearean comedy, Barbara Freedman explores how all three share the common function of interrogating and subverting traditional models of knowing.In this original, provocative book, Freedman defines theatricality as an interactive trap or strategic decentering that breaks down distinctions between observer and observed. She first grounds her interpretation of the theatrical gaze historically in the context of the humanistic tradition of right spectatorship and the Renaissance countertradition of trick perspectives; she then traces the use of the gaze from its roots in Renaissance optics and strategies of learned ignorance through Freud, Merleau-Ponty, and Lacan, to recent appropriations of Lacanian thought by feminism, deconstruction, cultural materialism, and film theory. In chapters on The Comedy of Errors, The Taming of the Shrew, A Midsummer Night's Dream, and Twelfth Night, Freedman shows how critical reception of the comedies repeats their games with error and distortion, denial and projection, optical politics and gender ideology. Her readings illuminate the counteraccusations of competing critical theories, and suggest that the comedies may serve as a means for rethinking the nature of spectatorship in contemporary theater and film.Staging the Gaze will be essential reading for Shakespeare scholars, for students of Renaissance literature, and for others interested in the controversies surrounding postmodern theory.

Table of Contents

Frontmatter -- Contents -- Illustrations -- Acknowledgments -- Introduction -- 1. Displacing a Spectator Consciousness: Theater, Psychoanalysis, and Renaissance Considerations of Representability -- 2. A Fractured Gaze: Theater, Cinema, Psychoanalysis -- 3. Reading Errantly: Misrecognition and the Uncanny in The Comedy ofErrors -- 4. Taming Difference and The Taming of the Shrew: Feminism, Psychoanalysis, Theater -- 5. Dis/Figuring Power: Censorship and Representation in A Midsummer Night's Dream -- 6. Naming Loss: Mourning and Representation in Twelfth Night -- Index