Yay!

I solved the biggest problem I’ve had with Hamlet since I ever first read it in my senior year of high school.  This is damn amazing and really worthwhile, and solves most of my problems with the ending of the play (always difficult to account for) and may make my thesis sort of actually a [...]

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Defense of Poetry

            Anxiety rests on the idea of poetry, and to a lesser extent literature, and its nature as an art.  Though the novel invited criticism and claims that its new form would allow literature to threaten the agency of the reader, poetry’s history, its claim as the original literary form and power within society, has [...]

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Chapters

The chapters in the thesis were going to be: Hamlet, Richard III, Antony and Cleopatra, MacBeth, Nature of Narrative.  I believe they’re now going to be, and this is very exciting:
Hamlet-Successful Narrative Usurptation
Richard III-Failed Narrative Usurptaiton
Non-Protagonist Usurpation- Prophesy, Messengers, and the internal audience
The Nature of Narrative
This organization just makes sense.  Don’t worry, you’re going to [...]

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Monologue in Richard III and Hamlet

            Soliloquy, at the turn of the century, is being re-identified, and begins to change in form from a long speech integrated into a dialog, to a mode of expressing the otherwise internal thought process of a character (de Grazia 74).  Still acknowledged as communication between two units, it becomes the dialog between the mind [...]

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Senecan Anger

            King Lear is a play without Providence, but with a strong conceptual understanding and hope there for.  From the beginning of the tragedy, which is instigated by Lear’s failure of judgment, Providence abandons the scene, and although there are many instances when the characters might again call forth reason and thereby gain salvation, but [...]

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Messengers Ant and Cleo

            Messengers play a prominent role in The Tragedy of Antony and Cleopatra from the beginning of the play.  Although their prominence fades as the play continues, there is still an unusual emphasis both on delivering messages, the messages themselves, and how the deliverer of messages is treated.  In the last lines of Act I, [...]

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Barthes

In trying to define the tirade between the author, narrator, and reader Roland Barthes’ work will be useful.  Barthes seems to focus not on the person responsible for the text, but rather on the responsibility of the creativity of the text itself, almost to a point where it seems the readers job is not to [...]

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Narrative Theory

The next big issue to tackle is defining “narrative theory” and to justify its importance.  This should be a relatively straightforward endeavor (knock on wood) because of work I’ve done in the past.  I intend to rely heavily on the criticism of Gerard Gerard, so that should also be fun.

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Messengers

Antony and Cleopatra is a play of travel and of messangers.  The messengers are the first and  most obvious narrators in my analysis.  Although Shakespeare has many more overt narrators, who offer pithy sayings and philosophies of life that are essentially authorial insertions into the text of the play, these are actually poor examples of narration [...]

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Project Design

So.  I’m looking for a universalizing theory of literature, and I’m looking to demonstrate how such a theory can be applied and in so doing apply the theory to the cannonical member in the set of works of English literature, to wit, Shakespeare.
 Narrative Theory addresses the problem of authorship and the problem of responsibility in literature [...]

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