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Shakespeare and Modern Culture | 
 enlarge | Author: Marjorie Garber
Publisher: Pantheon
Category: Book
List Price: $30.00
Buy New: $17.99
You Save: $12.01 (40%)
New (33) Used (7) from $17.99
Rating:  1 reviews
Sales Rank: 21501
Media: Hardcover
Pages: 368
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.6
Dimensions (in): 9 x 6.4 x 1.6
ISBN: 0307377679
Dewey Decimal Number: 822.33
EAN: 9780307377678
ASIN: 0307377679
Publication Date: December 9, 2008 (New: Last 30 Days)
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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Product Description
From one of the world’s premier Shakespeare scholars, author of Shakespeare After All (“the indispensable introduction to the indispensable writer”–Newsweek): a magisterial new study whose premise is “that Shakespeare makes modern culture and that modern culture makes Shakespeare.”
Shakespeare has determined many of the ideas that we think of as “naturally” our own and even as “naturally” true–ideas about human character, individuality and selfhood, government, leadership, love and jealousy, men and women, youth and age. Yet many of these ideas, timely as ever, have been reimagined–are indeed often now first encountered–not only in modern fiction, theater, film, and the news but also in the literature of psychology, sociology, political theory, business, medicine, and law.
Marjorie Garber delves into ten plays to explore the interrelationships between Shakespeare and twentieth century and contemporary culture–from James Joyce’s Ulysses to George W. Bush’s reading list. In The Merchant of Venice, she looks at the question of intention; in Hamlet, the matter of character; in King Lear, the dream of sublimity; in Othello, the persistence of difference; and in Macbeth, the necessity of interpretation. She discusses the conundrum of man in The Tempest; the quest for exemplarity in Henry V; the problem of fact in Richard III; the estrangement of self in Coriolanus; and the untimeliness of youth in Romeo and Juliet.
Shakespeare and Modern Culture is a tour de force reimagining of our own mental and emotional landscape as refracted through the prism of protean “Shakespeare.”
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| Customer Reviews:
"Every Reader His Own Carver? December 21, 2008
Stanley H. Nemeth (Garden Grove, CA United States)
11 out of 19 found this review helpful
The ostensible thesis of this book is that "Shakespeare makes modern culture and modern culture makes Shakespeare." This is an odd, far too generous assertion by Marjorie Garber because as she herself is quick to point out, so many of the examples throughout this book simply show numerous modern persons consistently misinterpreting Shakespearean quotations or crudely applying them quite wide of the mark to contemporary events. A shrewder, less "democratic" analysis of the phenomena she's examining would have suggested that while distortions of Shakespeare may have played a role in creating "modern culture," so misreading him can in no way actually alter, much less "create," the essential nature of his work. Now there is no question Garber herself has a solider grasp of Shakespeare than her thesis implies, and when she gets off of her academically requisite Marx, Freud, and Foucault homages and her surely by now stale, grad school fascination with race, gender, ethnicity, and gossip, she says some meaningful, if hardly novel, things about specific plays. For instance, she observes of "Othello" that "the through line for the entire play [is] its emphasis on false sight, on appearances and stagings, on lies told with an ingratiating smile...." Is there any reader who won't find Garber's endorsement of previous interpretation here more helpful than, say, her gossipy tendency to inform us as to which of Paul Robson's Desdemonas became his lovers?
I question the necessity for Garber's scattered, ill-argued book. Was she, as an American scholar, under pressure to say -or more likely appear to say - something new about Shakespeare? Oscar Wilde in my view gave us the proper response to Garber's present work when, as is reported, after enduring with considerable patience the babble of a number of Shakespearean critics at a dinner party on the question of whether Hamlet were really mad or only feigning madness, he finally asked with false naivete, "Are the CRITICS of "Hamlet" really mad or only feigning madness?"
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