Synopses & Reviews
What's the worst thing you can do to Shakespeare? The answer is simple: don't read him. To that end, Richard Burt and Julian Yates embark here on a project of un/reading the Bard, through both reverent and irreverent discourse. Addressing recent critical debates around problems of print and performance, works in media theory and deconstruction, and film adaptations, the chapters uncover areas of confluence and reveal the inventive ways in which these areas respond to each other. Ultimately, this book turns conventional challenges into a roadmap for textual analysis and a thorough reconsideration of the plays in light of their absorption into global culture.
Review
"A successful and challenging study of the topos of unreadability in recent (as well as historic) Shakespeare criticism." - Julia Reinhard Lupton, Professor of English, The University of California, Irvine, USA and author of Thinking with Shakespeare
Review
"In What's the Worse Thing You Can Do to Shakespeare?, seasoned icono-clashers Richard Burt and Julian Yates scan the Shakespearean mediascape for its intensities, lags, evasions, and misfires. In wryly techno-savvy readings that cross-cut between the First Folio, conceived as a canny media launch, and contemporary video and film refractions, Burt and Yates renew the enterprise of close reading without either fetishizing the Shakespearean original or exchanging the vertiginous risks of unreadability for quick laughs and easy access." - Julia Reinhard Lupton, Professor of English, The University of California, Irvine, USA and author of Thinking with Shakespeare: Essays on Politics and Life
Review
"In What's the Worse Thing You Can Do to Shakespeare?, seasoned icono-clashers Richard Burt and Julian Yates scan the Shakespearean mediascape for its intensities, lags, evasions, and misfires. In wryly techno-savvy readings that cross-cut between the First Folio, conceived as a canny media launch, and contemporary video and film refractions, Burt and Yates renew the enterprise of close reading without either fetishizing the Shakespearean original or exchanging the vertiginous risks of unreadability for quick laughs and easy access." - Julia Reinhard Lupton, Professor of English, The University of California, Irvine, USA and author of Thinking with Shakespeare: Essays on Politics and Life"A spectacular traversal and updating of Shakespeare's legacy as media event and up-to-the-minute report on traumatic narratives, blatant or concealed, that continue to hound us. I have the chapter on Hamlet's telephone on speed dial. A genuine achievement of boundary-breaking proportions and strong achronicities." - Avital Ronell, University Professor of German, Comparative Literature, and English, New York University, USA"Shakespeare is in the right kind of danger when he is taken up by the authors of this bracing, shamelessly provocative, and at times charming book. What's the Worst Thing You Can Do to Shakespeare? asks how different media forms have jostled or interrupted our relationship with Shakespeare. Informed by the materialist turn in recent criticism, this book calls attention to the ways in which a variety of media forms - film, audio recordings, digital media, manuscript and print sources - create gaps in the archive that is Shakespeare. Filling, or failing to fill in these gaps, is the subject of this engaging study, which is far from the worst thing you could do to Shakespeare." - Michael Witmore, author of Shakespearean Metaphysics, and, with Rosamond Purcell, Landscapes of the Passing Strange: Reflections from Shakespeare
Synopsis
What's the worst thing you can do to Shakespeare? The answer is simple: don't read him. To that end, Richard Burt and Julian Yates embark on a project of un/reading the Bard, turning the conventional challenges into a roadmap for textual analysis and a thorough reconsideration of the plays in light of their absorption into global culture.
Synopsis
Unreadable Shakespeare seeks to examine the frequently invoked 'un-readability' of Shakespeare's texts as a peculiar symptom of their absorption into global, mediated culture. Combining close textual analysis, history of the book, media studies, and a willingness to see possibilities for enabling / enlivening responsiveness in cultural forms with a shameless sense of the fun to be had in reading, this book serves as a guide to the way un-readability haunts Shakespeare Studies as a whole. Allied to this re-description of the field, chapter-length readings rethink the nature of Shakespeare's plays as they are altered by adaptations, spin-offs, and translation.
About the Author
Richard Burta Professor in the Department of English and Film and Media Studies Program at the University of Florida. Burt is the author three book, the editor or co-editor of another six anthologies, and the author of over forty articles and book chapters on topics including Shakespeare, Renaissance drama, literary theory, film adaptation, the Middle Ages in film and media, the erotics of pedagogy, cinematic paratexts, and censorship. He held a Fulbright scholarship in Berlin, Germany from 1995-96, and taught there at the Free University and the Humboldt University. Julian Yatesis an Associate Professor of English and Material Culture Studies at University of Delaware. He is the author of some twenty book-chapters, essays, and journal articles on topics including Shakespeare, Renaissance English prose, ecology and literature, animal studies, actor network theory, and thing theory. His first book, Error, Misuse, Failure: Object Lessons from the English Renaissance(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003) was a finalist for the MLA Best First Book Prize in 2003. He has been the recipient of a long-term NEH fellowship at the Folger Shakespeare Library (2006-2007), a Francis Bacon Award from the Huntington Library (2007), and a Franklin Award from the American Philosophical Society (2007-2008). A special issue of Shakespeare Studies on 'Shakespeare and Ecology' edited by Yates will appear later this year.
Table of Contents
1. What's the Worst Thing You Can Do to Shakespeare?
2. 'Oh, horrible, most horrible!' - Hamlet's Telephone
3. Romeo and Juliet is for Zombies
4. Drown Before Reading: Prospero's Missing Book…s
5. Anonymous / Anony/mess