... miles on main roads between cities. Editors such as Jill L. Levenson have assumed that “presently” means that Balthazar left Verona “immediately” after Juliet's funeral (Oxford, 2000, p. 331n.). But “immediately” is not the only ...

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How does a father manage the death of his son or his father? What might a playwright do? This article proposes that confronted with the multiple loss of his son Hamnet and subsequently his father John, William Shakespeare experienced a transformational consciousness event or “spiritual problem” (DSM IV), defined by Grof and Grof as a “spiritual emergency” (SE), which he explores through the making of his masterpiece Hamlet. The play’s central male character is a fine example of an instrumental masculine response to coping with loss. It is argued that the depiction of Hamlet’s struggle towards self knowledge can be explained in terms of Stan Grof’s model of transformation. In his play Shakespeare expresses a unique view of complicated masculine grief and loss. Through Hamlet’s soliloquies he explores and maps the terrifying terrain and rich interior world of his own psychic journey and transformation.


www.jmmsweb.org/issues/volume2/number2/pp95-115

Our time is characterized by a crisis of representational
practice, fuelled by unprecedented technological and economic changes on a global level. Narrative, therefore, takes a wide variety of forms. This course examines the aesthetics and techniques of film and literature from around the world, and analyses the masters of each art form. Through short stories and plays, we will study different ways a story can be told and the many exciting ways embedded "narratives" (or discourses) can be framed. Similarly, through films and film adaptations of great literary masterpieces, we will study how visual elements challenge the reader's imagination.


Specifically, we examine the relationship between meaning
and narrative structure. The course considers the tensions
between claims for originality and poetic license, between
producers and audiences, between fiction and reality, narrative and history, memory and representation. We will study representative theorists of narratology, such as J. Hillis Miller, Wolfgang Iser and Hayden White. Cutting-edge scholarship on film and the new media will also be introduced, such as Seymour Chatman, Rey Chow, as well as Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin's Remediation. In addition to becoming familiar with major issues in film studies and East-West comparative studies, students will acquire a working knowledge of narrative theory.

Empathy is a subject that could easily fi nd a home in any one of the sections of this volume. After all, early modern thinking about emotional identifi cation with another person -whether described as pity, compassion, or fellow-feeling -draws from the wellsprings of both classical and Christian ethics. To attempt to separate one from the other may be not only impossible but also undesirable, especially given that Shakespearean drama often takes its energy from the very confl ation or juxtaposition of ethical registers. Th e awakening of Hermione's statue in Th e Winter's Tale is part Ovidian metamorphosis, part Christian resurrection. Lear's reconciliation with Cordelia derives much of its power from the vertiginous blending of New Testament forgiveness and Seneca's theory of reciprocal benefi ts. 1 Nevertheless, in this chapter I aim to treat Shakespeare's ethics of empathy as a facet of his classicism, both because the classical aspects of empathy in Shakespearean drama are less well understood than the Christian and because a classically focused consideration of empathy illuminates Th e Tempest in a new way. Th e impetus for this approach comes from the rhetorical orientation of the humanist curriculum, in which learning to speak well also meant learning to inhabit and imitate the literary voices of the classical past. 2 While Shakespeare would have had access to ethical assessments of fellow-feeling in a variety of philosophical, religious, and political texts, his education in empathy in the schoolroom began through reading and imitating literary works of classical antiquity. 1 For the Ciceronian and Senecan ethical background of King Lear , see Eden. 2 Scholars have long understood the explosion of imaginative literature in England in the second half of the sixteenth century in relation to the fortunes of humanist education. Essential for this terrain is Baldwin, but see also Jones. Important historical studies of humanist education in England include Alexander and Charlton. Th e relationship between humanist education and Renaissance literature has been complicated and enlivened by a number of recent studies. See especially Barkan, Burrow, and Dolven. For the cultivation of emotional identifi cation in the humanist curriculum, see Enterline.

Despite being recognized as one of the greatest playwrights of all time, Shakespeare is well known to have many problematic relationships to power that are extended into his texts. One example of this is patriarchy and his portrayal of women, and lack thereof. The Tempest is an example of this through Shakespeare's near total exclusion of women from the play. Miranda is the only women that ever appears in this play, and the only other one that is mentioned is Sycorax, who is dead long before the events of the play take place. This leaves limited options when examining gender relations within the play. The portrayal of Miranda serves as a good point of analysis as the only woman, however, particularly in her relationship to her father. Prospero, her father, is one of the major perpetrators of this, as he keeps her isolated and controls what she learns, which serves to maintain his power over her and the island. He uses many techniques of patriarchal abuse in order to keep this power dynamic upheld. On top of this all, Prospero also uses rhetorical objectification within his discussion of Miranda and planning of his future, as he seems to care little about her feelings or needs. These examples help us to understand how patriarchy pervades the play and shades our understanding of the characters within away from what Shakespeare and his audience may have perceived. Rather than the good, heroic wizard that audiences may have perceived him to be, I argue that these analyses prove that Prospero is not heroic, but abusive, controlling and hungry for power.

The purpose of my thesis has been to establish the reasons for adapting Shakespeare for children in the modern age and to see if adaptations are influenced by the time they are written. From my analysis of forty- two adaptations for children of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, covering a period of almost two hundred years, three distinct trends have emerged. The first is the evolution of Shakespeare, in terms of his reputation and literary prestige. The second is the growth in the variety of adaptations of Shakespeare for children. The third is the tendency of treatments to reflect the eras in which they were produced. This project represents an under-discussed field of Shakespeare studies. Comparing a wide variety of texts in the context of the time they were written has been neglected, as has the comparison of texts in different eras. This project covers seven time periods (with a chapter devoted to each): 1800 to 1840 (The Beginning); 1850 to 1910 (The Golden Age), 1919 to 1939 (Between the Wars); 1940 to 1959 (Post War Recovery); 1960 to 1979 (Performance Adaptations); 1980 to 1989 (Shakespeare in Schools) and 1990 to 1999 (End of a Millennium). I argue three points: The first is that the prestige of Shakespeare has been systematically and consistently reinforced in each generation echoing his development from England’s greatest writer to an international icon. The second is that adaptations of MND have been influenced for the past 200 years by education in one way or another, either for pedagogic use or as metatheatrical device, ensuring an increasing variety of adaptations. The third is that MND has been rewritten to suit a specific era and audience.

This paper analyzes the characterization of female characters of William Shakespeare's four famous plays—Hamlet, Twelfth Night, Romeo and Juliet, Henry VI Part I—and the Dark Lady in his sonnets to establish him as protagonist of feminism in the Elizabethan period. The study divides female characters in two categories—the conformist, and the heretical—to present how Shakespeare views women of his time and how he wants women to rise above everything and to have an active role in the society. This comparative study found Shakespeare creating the first group of women who are highly dominated by their male counterparts with no active role are victimized by the situation; in contrast, the other group who are very active and dominating on their male counterparts are taking control of the situation while transcending the limitation imposed by Elizabethan society and challenge the conventional idea of that age.

Early literary instances of artificial humanoid and intelligent systems anticipate in a general way the kinds of thematic issues that cyborgs, androids, and intelligent networks like supercomputers bring up for the contemporary notion of the posthuman, understood as a condition in which the human and the machine are becoming increasingly intermingled. Humans have never really been autonomous entities, but rather have always been intimately interdependent upon their environments and tools. And their dreams of intelligent tools even extend back into the era of ancient Rome and Greece, as I will describe below. Thus the seemingly modern idea of a reciprocal dependency upon mechanical devices is just a variation of a much older theme.

En este trabajo se analizará en Shakespeare, sobre todo a partir de King Lear, aquellos rasgos que lo acercan al movimiento barroco -y su posible explicación desde el contexto histórico-, por comparación con los dramaturgos españoles y a partir de la conceptualización de Emilio Carilla sobre el estilo artístico. Desde Carilla, se prestará atención especialmente al desengaño, la quinta característica que el crítico argentino reconoce en el movimiento, para explicar cómo se manifiesta el "pesimismo" shakesperiano en las grandes tragedias del dramaturgo isabelino: "Hamlet", "Othello", "Macbeth" y, especialmente, "King Lear".

This dissertation will argue that the early modern theatre and the early modern church were both concerned with keeping the attention of their audiences, and that one of the ways that dramatic interest in Christopher Marlowe's and William Shakespeare's plays was generated was by staging acts that can be read as ambiguous, interrupted, failed or parodic confessions, prayers, and sermons. In particular, I will argue that when the characters in Marlowe’s and Shakespeare’s tragedies fail to find solace in acts that model reformed devotional practices, they eventually suffer the strange but dramatically engaging consequences of their tragic passions like despair, hatred, jealousy, fear, and rage. This dissertation, then, will bridge the turn to religion and affect studies as a means of arguing that early modern tragedy was consumed with attracting, and sustaining, the dramatic attention of the audience. While it is not possible to say, with any finality, why tragedies hook an audience's attention, it is possible to suggest how Marlowe's and Shakespeare's tragedies used the passions generated by the failure of model devotional acts as a means of capturing and sustaining the attention of the audience.

SESSION I: INTERTEXT AND GENERIC FORM
(sponsored by RSA's Humanism discipline)

"Parody and the Abstraction of Character"
Samuel Fallon, SUNY Geneseo, USA

"Characters in Search of a Plot:
Intertextual Dynamics in Gascoigne’s Adventures of Master F. J."
Robert H. F. Carver, University of Durham, UK

"Character As Meme"
Katherine Schaap Williams, University of Toronto, CAN


SESSION II: TECHNIQUE AND TECHNOLOGY
(sponsored by RSA's Humanism discipline)

"Poor Painted Shadows: Non-Shakespearean Characterization in Shakespeare"
Lara Bovilsky, University of Oregon, USA

"'Sparks of living fire': Ethopoeia and Ovid’s Heroides in the works of Christopher Marlowe"
Asa Olson, Gustavus Adolphus University, USA

"Navel-Gazing and Performance:
The Creation of Character in Ralph Josselin’s Diary (1641-1683)"
Anne M. Myers, University of Missouri, USA

This essay examines the plural nature and meaning of the word "bond" in Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice, dispelling popular readings of the play as anti-market. The Merchant of Venice is open to an array of interpretations favorable to commerce, and Shakespeare's Venice anticipates certain Hayekian notions about societies that accommodate competing interests and cultures.

A comparison of Shakespeare's The Tempest with Marina Warner's rewriting, Indigo to explore the concept of proto-colonialism. The re-writings of characters as colonisers-colonised will be explored with regards to postcolonial theories to identify colonial traits within Shakespeare's play.

Dealing with themes of forgiveness, revenge, responsibility, and self-interest, Cianfrance's film is unabashedly, relentlessly and almost defiantly sentimental. It wears its sentimentalism like a badge of honor and makes it work by telling its story in a forthright and serious manner, eliciting powerful performances from actors, and using apposite visuals to convey the sadness of the narrative. The Light Between Oceans is not a great film but it is engaging, moving and beautiful.

In Capital Vol. 1, Karl Marx seeks to explain away the ‘dazzling’ quality of the money-form through an analysis of a simple equation. But even after the veil has been lifted, the mystical force of money remains. In this paper, I suggest that traces of the ‘dazzling’ quality of the money form and the humanist concerns of a ‘young Marx’ linger in the figurative and performative function of language in Capital. I seek to draw out these traces by reading the origins of the money-form in Capital Vol. I through the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844. Following Kojin Karatani, I examine the micro-differences and similarities between these two texts in order to un-cover the transformative force and violence implicit in the concept of money as the universal exchange form. I do so by examining the lingering presence of figurative language and literary tropes, focusing specifically on the tension between the scientific and descriptive language of Marx text.

Anche a proposito del "Macbeth", come delle maggiori tragedie shakespeariane, va detto che è anzitutto necessario non ingabbiare -e così snaturare -l'opera nello schema di una definizione psicologica. Troppo spesso, anche sulla scorta dello psicologismo romantico, si tende a parlare del "Macbeth" come della tragedia dell'ambizione, allo stesso modo in cui si parla dell'"Otello" come della tragedia della gelosa e del "Re Lear" come una tragedia dell'ingratitudine filiale. Che sono tutte, naturalmente, definizioni esatte se tendono a individuare un aspetto, magari il più evidente, dell'opera; ma che risultano fuorvianti e riduttive se presumono di esprimere il significato globale dell'opera stessa. Il che non significa che nel caso del "Macbeth" non si debba parlare di ambizione, anche se altri sentimenti e disposizioni dell'animo vengono analizzati e rappresentati. L'ambizione c'è ed è centrale: non solo, ma, più ancora che nell'"Otello", la passione dominante è indagata da vari punti di vista. L'ambizione è vista non soltanto attraverso Macbeth (in cui essa è colta nel suo primo nascere, durante il primo incontro con le streghe,

This book addresses the motif of literary twinship from the Shakespearean age until today. Twins have all too often been discussed as mere footnotes to the allegedly more nuanced motif of the doppelganger, or as a kind of 'embarrassing' secret of literary history that is said to occur merely in inferior genres like farce or horror fiction. This study, by contrast, makes a case for the complexity of literary twinship across the literary spectrum, and it demonstrates that twinship articulates bodily anxieties, dynastic troubles, and genetic concerns that the classic double trope cannot ac-commodate. While the book does not deliver a complete and unabridged history of literary twin-ship (as such a history would inevitably be one marked by long gaps), it still examines twinship in a diachronic fashion and in different historical periods in order to show how the category of twinship is frequently re-negotiated as part of larger discursive shifts. Some historical periods understand twins mainly as a biological conundrum that threatens to expose the arbitrary laws of dynastic kin-ship, others as an epistemological problem that challenges any attempt to impose clear-cut definitions.
The individual case studies trace the development of the category of twinship over time, demonstrating how the twin was repeatedly (re-)invented as a cultural and pathological type when other discursive areas (including the fields of criminology and eugenics) constituted themselves, and how it served as the battleground for ideological disputes. It is in-midst of these discursive processes that I locate literary twinship, and my goal is not to demonstrate that literature 'mirrors' scientific debates of the day. Not only is it evident that literature frequently prefigured the discussions of modern twin scholarship, it has also been instrumental in facilitating these debates and in contributing to the negotiation of power shifts, for instance by setting the stage for debates regarding kinship systems in the Shakespearean age, by engaging in the Victorian reformulation of the criminal as genetically/pathologically evil, or by contributing to the dystopian quality of cloning discourse in the 20th century.

This reflection essay was commissioned by Mount St. Mary's University in 2001, and examines some conceptual overlap between two generically bending and historically separated texts, Shakespeare's much discussed play "The Merchant of Venice," and Walter van Tilburg Clarke's cowboy novel "The Oxbow Incident."

*** I consider this essay an interesting example of my juvinelia, but it is specifically NOT a research essay, for the editor's directions were to compose reflection pieces based more in exercises of close reading.

This article disrupts present-day readings of women’s experience of and diagnoses with depression by reading them in the light of the patriarchally inscribed experience of melancholia in the early modern period as explored in Shakespeare and Wilkins’ Pericles. It reads the paralleled experiences of Pericles and Marina and early modern proto-medical treatises in the light of contemporary psychiatric diagnostic practice and psychosocial research. It considers how norms, gendering, and privilege can affect the way an individual’s expression of their experience is read, received, diagnosed, and treated, as eroticised cures are laid against talking therapies in Pericles, and the gendered application of the labels of melancholia and depression and the gendered assumptions undergirding therapeutic interventions are probed. In so doing, it shows the value of reading early modern drama through a medical humanities lens to underline the biases which still have a measurable impact in mental health diagnostic settings today. The stark consequences of these biases for women emerge when these texts are brought into interdisciplinary and transhistorical dialogue. The early modern and present strands are pulled together by exploring how Pericles pushes back against the way gender can be leveraged to mistreat, exploit or silence.

The Avignon Off and the Edinburgh Fringe Festival have a favourite Shakespearean play: Romeo and Juliet. Between 2011 and 2014, the play has been staged fourteen times at the Edinburgh Fringe and thirteen at the Avignon Off. This success can be owing to its status as a well-known love story, its popularity and its emblematic scenes. Among the abundance of productions, two main trends can be identified: whereas many of the productions at the Edinburgh Fringe are staged by amateur groups, professional companies re-write the play or use it as a point of departure at the Avignon Off. This chapter seeks to address how Romeo and Juliet allows for different approaches in these two alternative festivals and, at the same time, it looks for reasons that explain the popularity of the play in 21st-century popular culture.

“언제 어떻게 하나의 기록이 문학이 되는가?
그때 무슨 일이 일어나는가? 이는 무엇 때문이며 누구 때문인가?”

“프랑스가 지구상에 배출한 가장 위대한 철학자 중 한 사람”(자크 시라크)이자 ‘해체주의’를 창시하여 기존 서양 철학의 전통을 뒤엎으며 현대 철학의 새로운 지평을 열어젖힌 자크 데리다. 그의 문학론을 묶어 펴낸 흥미로운 책이 문학과지성사에서 ‘현대의 문학 이론’ 시리즈로 출간되었다. 한 편의 인터뷰와 열 편의 에세이로 구성된 『문학의 행위』(데릭 애트리지 엮음, 정승훈・진주영 옮김)가 바로 그것.

데리다의 문학론―한 편의 인터뷰와 열 편의 에세이
자크 데리다는 초기작에서부터 문학의 부름을 받아왔다. 희곡, 시, 소설을 포함하여 불어, 독어, 영어로 된 텍스트에 이르기까지 ‘문학’에 대한 데리다의 글은 넘쳐난다. 이 책은 이러한 광범위한 문학 텍스트들에 대한 데리다의 응답들 다수를 몇 가지 기준에 따라 선택하여 한자리에 모은 것이다.
데리다와의 인터뷰를 포함해 모두 11편의 글로 이루어진 이 책은 루소, 말라르메, 카프카, 블랑쇼, 조이스, 퐁주, 첼란, 그리고 셰익스피어에 이르기까지 문학과 철학 사이의 접면을 전례 없는 방식으로 횡단하며 데리다 특유의 해체적 독서를 시도한다. 이렇듯 책에 실린 데리다의 텍스트들이 응답하고 있는 구체적인 작품들은 문학의 모든 행위—행위와 기록—이다. 즉 관습적이고 제도적으로 ‘문학적’이라고 범주화된 작품들이자, 또한 어떤 식으로든 문학을 수행하고 상연하며 그것의 법을 수립하거나 의문시하는 작품들, 제도와 범주를 확인하는 동시에 그것들로부터 내적인 거리를 두고 작동하는 작품들. 이런 의미에서 데리다의 텍스트들 또한 ‘문학 행위’라 말할 수 있을 것이다.
책 서두에 실린 인터뷰는 ‘문학’과 ‘철학’의 문제를 비롯해 정치, 역사, 페미니즘 등 다양한 분야에 걸쳐 있는 데리다 사상의 면모를 그의 육성을 통해 답하고 있다는 점에서 더욱 흥미로운 독서를 제공한다. 엮은이인 데릭 애트리지의 세심한 편집 또한 이 책이 지닌 미덕이다. 상세한 머리말과 한 챕터 분량의 개론, 그리고 데리다와의 인터뷰는 이 선집이 갖는 의도와 의미를 충실히 전달한다. 뿐만 아니라 각 글들 첫머리에 핵심과 맥락을 짚어주는 소개글을 덧붙임으로써, 난해하기로 악명 높은 데리다 텍스트를 이해하는 실마리를 던져준다.

“문학이라 불리는 이상한 제도”―데리다와 문학의 문제
그렇다면 데리다에게 ‘문학’이란 무엇인가? 문학 연구에 몸담아온 모든 이들에게 핵심적일 수밖에 없는 이 질문은 플라톤과 아리스토텔레스 이래의 서양 철학 전통 내에서도 끊임없이 반복하여 제기되어왔다. 이는 결국 문학적 질문이 아니라 철학적인 질문이다. 이 질문은 문학의 본질에 대한 진술을, 문학을 문학이 아닌 모든 것과 구별하는 요소를 추궁하기 때문이다. 따라서 “문학이란 무엇인가?”라는 질문은 “철학이란 무엇인가?”라는 질문과 분리될 수 없으며 문화, 정치, 윤리 혹은 역사를 포함한 모든 고려 속에 내포되어 있다.
이 책에서 데리다가 강조하는 바는 “문학이 하나의 제도”라는 점이다. 그에 따르면 “자체적으로 문학적인 텍스트란 없”으며, “문학은 자연적으로 혹은 머릿속에서 주어진 것이 아니라 역사적, 지리적으로 지도를 그릴 수 있는 사회적, 법적, 정치적 과정에 의해 생겨났다.” 특히 17세기 혹은 18세기 이래 서구 민주주의 국가들에서 경험해온 문학이라는 제도는, 우리 주변의 여러 언어적 실천 가운데서도 문학을 독특한 어떤 것으로 만드는 특징을 지니고 있다. 데리다는 바로 그 특이성을 강조한다. “관습과 규칙 등을 가진 역사적 제도로서의 문학, 그러나 또한 원칙적으로 모든 것을 말할 힘을 가진, 이러한 규칙을 어기고 이를 몰아냄으로써 자연과 제도, 자연과 관습법, 자연과 역사 사이의 전통적 차이점을 도입하고 발명하고 더 나아가 의문시하는 그러한 제도로서의 문학.”
이러한 의미에서 거의 최초와 다름없는 이 문학 선집이 갖는 의미는 각별하다고 할 수 있다. 서구의 사고방식을 가능하게 한 숨겨진 조건으로서 ‘문자’를 탐구하는 것이 바로 ‘해체’라 불리는 데리다의 작업이었고, 따라서 그의 작업은 서구 사상을 대표하는 구체적인 작품들에 밀착한 연구일 수밖에 없기 때문이다. 우리에게 잘 알려진 데리다의 ‘철학 텍스트 읽기’가 아닌 ‘문학 텍스트 읽기’ 작업을 한데 모은 이 책은, 이런 의미에서 난해하기 짝이 없는 ‘해체’란 현상을 이해하는 또 다른 길잡이가 되어줄 것이다. 뿐만 아니라 데리다 작품에 나타난 문학, 즉 문학 텍스트와 문학이라는 제도의 의미를, 그리고 문학에 있어서의 데리다 저작의 의미를 새롭게 생각해보는 계기를 마련해줄 것이다.

루소, 말라르메, 조이스, 퐁주, 카프카, 셰익스피어……
‘문학’과 ‘철학’ 사이를 종횡무진 횡단하는 지적 사유의 모험
이렇듯 문학 텍스트에 대한 데리다의 글쓰기는 어떠한 관습적인 의미에서도 논평이나 비평, 해석이 아니다. 데리다의 글쓰기는 문학작품을 위치 짓거나 장악하거나 철저히 규명하거나 번역하거나 꿰뚫어보지 않는다. 문학에 대한 데리다의 텍스트는 문학적인 정도 이상으로 철학적인 것은 아니라 해도 여전히 철학적인 질문에 사로잡혀 있으며, 문학 텍스트에 의한 철학의 해체가 감지될 수 있는 방법을 찾는다. 그렇게 함으로써 문학에서 문학적인 것이 무엇인지를 전면에 내세운다. 문학이라는 단어를 글쓰기나 법과 같은 용어로 만드는 그 무엇, 문학이 속한 담론과 제도를 뒤흔들 수 있는 그 무엇 말이다.
1장 「“문학이라 불리는 이상한 제도”」는 엮은이인 데릭 애트리지와 자크 데리다와의 인터뷰로 책 전반을 아우르는 구체적인 질문과 답변을 통해 ‘문학’과 ‘철학’의 문제를 흥미진진하게 풀어냈다. 인터뷰는 데리다의 제안으로 성사되었으며 이전에 출판된 적은 없다. 2장 「“이 위험한 대리보충”」은 데리다의 주저 『그라마톨로지』  제2부 2장으로, 루소 텍스트들 가운데 ‘대리보충’이라는 단어의 변덕스러운 사용에 주목했다. 3장 「말라르메」는 제목 그대로 말라르메 작품에 관한 짧은 논의를 담고 있다. “문학적”이기도 하고 그렇지 않은 것으로 분류되기도 하는 말라르메의 글쓰기는 문학과 문학 비평의 전통적인 범주를 뒤흔든다. 데리다에게 말라르메가 야기하고 징후화하는 위기는 새로우면서도, 또 아주 오래된 것이기도 하다. 4장 「첫번째 세션」에서 데리다는 어떻게 해서 미메시스가 진리 개념과 밀접히 연관되어왔는지를 보여준다. 이를 위해 데리다는 미메시스 개념의 내적 모순들이 분명히 드러나 있는 플라톤의 『필레보스』 발췌본과, 그 모순들을 구체적으로 보여주는 말라르메의 짧은 산문시 「미미크」를 겹쳐놓는다. 5장 「법 앞에서」는 이 글에서 인용하는 카프카 우화의 제목과 동일하다. “문학이란 무엇인가?”라는 자기 심문적 질문은 카프카의 짤막한 우화 「법 앞에서」에 대한 폭넓은 독해에서 다시금 제기된다. 6장 「장르의 법칙」은 5장 「법 앞에서」와 묶여 풍성하게 읽힐 수 있다. 「장르의 법칙」은 다른 문학 텍스트에서 출발하여, 법과 법의 대리인들에 대한 의무의 문제와 씨름하며, 또한 그 문제에 다가가는 데 있어서의 문학의 중요성을 붙잡고 늘어지는 에세이다. 7장 「율리시스 축음기: 소문으로 들은 조이스의 예스」는 조이스에 관한 데리다의 에세이로, 제9회 국제 제임스 조이스 심포지엄의 초청으로 개회 연설을 했을 당시 발표한 글이다. 8장 「「프시케: 타자의 발명」 중에서」에서 데리다는 프랑시스 퐁주를 논하며 ‘발명’이라는 이슈를 통해 ‘타자’라는 문제를 다룬다. 9장 「『시네퐁주』 중에서」는 8장에 이어 퐁주를 다루며, 서명과 고유명사라는 서로 밀접하게 연결된 문제에 매진한다. 10장 「『쉬볼렛: 파울 첼란을 위하여』 중에서」는 첼란 시에서 따온 여러 가지 모티프를 통해 그 이중적 특성에 초점을 맞추는데, 이 글에서는 암호 쉬볼렛, 할례, 재 그리고 날짜가 포함된다. 데리다가 “날짜의 수수께끼”라 부르는 이 특성이 이 글에서 가장 두드러진 주제를 이루고 있다. 마지막으로 11장 「아포리즘 대응시간」은 1986년 『로미오와 줄리엣』 파리 공연에 앞서 다니엘 메스기슈의 초청으로 마련된 데리다의 강연을 계기로 씌어졌다. 이 희곡은 서구 문화 역사 전체에 걸쳐 지속되는 문제점들을 표출하고 있음과 동시에 가장 친숙하고도 재소비되는 아이콘들 중 하나다. 데리다는 이 같은 두 가지 특성에 반응하고 이 둘을 대응시간에 초점을 맞춰 연결시킨다.

개론: 데리다와 문학의 문제_ 데릭 애트리지
1장 “문학이라 불리는 이상한 제도”_ 자크 데리다와의 인터뷰
2장 “이 위험한 대리보충”
3장 말라르메
4장 첫번째 세션
5장 법 앞에서
6장 장르의 법칙
7장 율리시스 축음기: 소문으로 들은 조이스의 예스
8장 「프시케: 타자의 발명」 중에서
9장 『시네퐁주』 중에서
10장 『쉬볼렛: 파울 첼란을 위하여』 중에서
11장 아포리즘 대응시간

This paper investigates the double standard of brothers and others present in two economic activities, usury and opium trade. Nelson indicated that the double standard of brothers and others refers to the unification of brothers and others in tribes and the division of brothers and others in universe (3). I firstly introduce the concept of usury and the context of opium trade, and then argue that how do brotherhood and otherhood contradict with each other in usury, an act of money lending with interest, within the play The Merchant of Venice by William Shakespeare. I further analyze that the paradox of brotherhood and otherhood in the opium trade betrays the law of comparative advantage within the novel Sea of Poppies by Amitav Ghosh. Finally, by explaining Adam Smith's opposing attitude towards colonialism, I demonstrate that opium merchants and colonial politicians selectively interpreted his idea of the invisible hand and then compare with The Merchant of Venice to argue that both Christians and Jews tend to selectively interpret the Bible as well to promote their own interest. Through exploring the contradiction of tribal brotherhood and universal otherhood, I assert that both Late-Renaissance Christians and Late-Modern colonists utilized the double standard of brothers and others as a tool to maximize their self-interest.

Wisdom traditions around the world share an ethic of lovingkindness, grounded in the belief of Oneness, a belief in spiritual oneness, corresponding to the notion that everything partakes the same constituting principle—energy, consciousness, life-force, be it Greek pneuma, Hindu prana, Chinese qi, or Native American Great Spirit. At the cusp of modernity, Shakespeare and his contemporaries were among the last heirs and subscribers in the West of such a monistic cosmic order. As meteorology mirrors the terror of the human experience, King Lear examines nature in multivalent and embedded senses as the elemental environment, the essence of humankind, and the interaction between the two—embodied in the concepts of “nothing” and “kindness.” These two notions intently lie also at the heart of Buddhism, the quintessential religion that posits human suffering and offers a path into wisdom and compassion, and through this cluster of affinity offers a fitting framework by which to explore King Lear.

            The cure for suffering, rooted in ignorance, is wisdom understood as the awareness that all phenomena lack intrinsic existence and that the self is a false belief without corresponding reality: though we may perceive our selves as tangible entities with dense mass, the world at the atomic or subatomic level is seamlessly interconnected and completely empty of self. Setting off a chain of actions within a matrix of nothing, suffering, and kindness, Lear comes to experience watershed moments of awakening during which he taps into something like Buddhist interbeing. Unencumbered by attachment and self-interest, he offers compassion to unfortunate others and envisions a Nirvana-like happiness of “singing like birds i’ the cage,” transcending the endless flow of contentious life into the very “mystery of things” (5.3.9, 16). Ultimately, when the audience must deal with Cordelia’s senseless death, a Buddhist response to adversity keys us into the equanimity, compassion, and prudential action also required to confront the various challenges ahead—pandemic, climate change, and persisting inequalities.