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"Kuzner, James"
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Shakespeare as a Way of Life: Skeptical Practice and the Politics of Weakness
Shakespeare as a Way of Life shows how reading Shakespeare helps us to live with epistemological weakness and even to practice this weakness, to make it a way of life. In a series of close readings, Kuzner shows how Hamlet, Lucrece, Othello, The Winter's Tale, The Tempest, and Timon of Athens, impel us to grapple with basic uncertainties: how we can be free, whether the world is abundant, whether we have met the demands of love and social life. To Kuzner, Shakespeare's skepticism doesn't have the enabling potential of Keats's heroic \"negativity capability,\" but neither is that skepticism the corrosive disease that necessarily issues in tragedy. While sensitive to both possibilities, Kuzner offers a way to keep negative capability negative while making skepticism livable. Rather than light the way to empowered, liberal subjectivity, Shakespeare's works demand lasting disorientation, demand that we practice the impractical so as to reshape the frames by which we view and negotiate the world. The act of reading Shakespeare cannot yield the practical value that cognitive scientists and literary critics attribute to it. His work neither clarifies our sense of ourselves, of others, or of the world; nor heartens us about the human capacity for insight and invention; nor sharpens our ability to appreciate and adjudicate complex problems of ethics and politics. Shakespeare's plays, rather, yield cognitive discomforts, and it is just these discomforts that make them worthwhile.
eBook
Shakespeare as a Way of Life
Shakespeare as a Way of Life shows how reading Shakespeare helps us to live with epistemological weakness and even to practice this weakness, to make it a way of life. In a series of close readings, Kuzner shows how Hamlet, Lucrece, Othello, The Winter's Tale, The Tempest, and Timon of Athens, impel us to grapple with basic uncertainties: how we can be free, whether the world is abundant, whether we have met the demands of love and social life. To Kuzner, Shakespeare's skepticism doesn't have the enabling potential of Keats's heroic \"negativity capability,\" but neither is that skepticism the corrosive disease that necessarily issues in tragedy. While sensitive to both possibilities, Kuzner offers a way to keep negative capability negative while making skepticism livable. Rather than light the way to empowered, liberal subjectivity, Shakespeare's works demand lasting disorientation, demand that we practice the impractical so as to reshape the frames by which we view and negotiate the world. The act of reading Shakespeare cannot yield the practical value that cognitive scientists and literary critics attribute to it. His work neither clarifies our sense of ourselves, of others, or of the world; nor heartens us about the human capacity for insight and invention; nor sharpens our ability to appreciate and adjudicate complex problems of ethics and politics. Shakespeare's plays, rather, yield cognitive discomforts, and it is just these discomforts that make them worthwhile.
eBook
Unbuilding the City: \Coriolanus\ and the Birth of Republican Rome
In England, such enabling possibilities included, but certainly were not limited to, the explosion of print (which afforded diverse experiences of private reading and individual interpretation), the rising popularity of theater and theatricality, growing opportunities for property acquisition and the attendant rise of possessive individualism, expanding codes of civility that enjoined individuals to keep the body and its processes as private as possible, heightened Protestant emphasis on inwardness, state-mandated religious persecution requiring Catholics to conceal their faith, and, most crucially for my purposes, the rise of English republicanism and its ideals of participatory government and personal liberty. 7 In these accounts, the influence of humoral theory-for which the self was understood as being fundamentally open, psychologically and corporeally porous, permeable, unstable, and volatile-was beginning to wane as the determining factor in the subject's self-understanding. 8 The lines dividing inside from outside were instead hardening, amid heightened desires and needs to assert the difference between self and not-self, to enrich and demarcate one's mind, and to cordon off one's body. Psychoanalytic critics-for instance, Janet Adelman and Cynthia Marshall-see in him a frantic, and failed, attempt to break from his phallic mother and secure a coherent masculine identity; 9 critics influenced by Marxism-such as Arthur Riss and Michael D. Bristol-see him mistakenly seeking to construct a territorialized, proprietary, and private life for himself; 10 liberal critics of the play, including Leonard Tennenhouse and Stanley Cavell, argue that Coriolanus wishes for privacy even in the linguistic sphere, that he tries to live \"in a world of private signification\" and to \"speak without conversing, without partaking in conversation.\"
Journal Article
Open Subjects
James Kuzner's original new study of writing by Spenser, Shakespeare, Marvell and Milton is the first to present a genealogy for the modern self in which its republican origins can be understood far more radically.
eBook
HABERMAS GOES TO HELL: PLEASURE, PUBLIC REASON, AND THE REPUBLICANISM OF \PARADISE LOST\
If figures like Michael Walzer are right to claim that current political thinking often, erroneously, sets principled rationality and passionate intensity at necessary loggerheads,1 and if - as I argue - even quite radical public sphere theorists such as Warner still tend to think critique and pleasure apart,2 my reading of Paradise Lost suggests that current theorizing about public reason and the republican legacy would do well to look more closely at texts of early modernity, when \"public\" reason and \"private\" passions, including pleasure, were deeply, regularly, and openly regarded as intertwined.3 This is so, I point out, even in spaces such as the coffeehouse, which, despite its association with the public sphere's structural overhaul, was full of the same pleasures depicted by Milton. Since Milton's publics, his republicanism, and his embrace of rational delight are themselves intertwined, study of his epic suggests that public and republican selves themselves need not - and ought not - undergo the transformation that would harden them against pleasurable, transformative words.
Journal Article
Friendship, Sovereignty, and Sexuality in Katherine Philips's Poetry
This article examines the tense, contradictory relationship between friendship and sovereignty in the poems of Katherine Philips. Philips's more optimistic poems suggest that if friends relinquish self-sovereignty in favor of ecstatic union, other, more valuable sovereignties might be achieved: friends might triumph over limits imposed by embodiment, or be able to free themselves from a corrupt world, or even face together the supposedly ultimate separation of death. Her laments about friendship, by contrast, explore dark sides of what it can mean to be without self-sovereignty or without regard for it: to be subject to the tyranny of a friend now figured as absolutely sovereign; to wish to subject the friend to one's own tyranny; or to languish while the friend enjoys her own freedom. Rather than resolve this contradiction, Philips places it at friendship's center, suggesting that intense subjective incoherence and ambivalent desire are what friendship have to offer.
Journal Article
