Disowning Knowledge

Since the publication of his celebrated first essay on Shakespeare, The Avoidance of Love: A reading of King Lear, Stanley Cavell has continued to explore radically new and provocative interpretations of a number of the plays. This volume collects those writings for the first time and includes pieces not previously published. The essays are bound together by a concern for scepticism. In Coriolanus' disdain, Leontes' and Othello's jealousy, Hamlet's inertia, and Lear's exorbitance, Stanley Cavell sees Shakespeare as offering, for the first time in European letters, a profound diagnosis of the sceptical refusal to acknowledge truths about oneself and one's relations to others, and as exploring the motives and tragic consequences of that refusal. His readings of the plays are subtle and challenging, and the insights they contain often startle by both their originality and their familiarity. As a whole they present a unique point of view on the plays.

Preface and acknowledgments; 1. Introduction; 2. The Avoidance of Love: a reading of King Lear; 3. Othello and the stake of the other; 4. Coriolanus and interpretations of politics; 5. Hamlet's burden of proof; 6. Recounting gains, showing losses: reading The Winter's Tale; Index of names and titles.

'Disowning Knowledge makes wonderfully clear why Stanley Cavell's career-long struggle with the philosophical problem of skepticism converges so forcefully with his preoccupation with Shakespearean theater. Admirers of Cavell's remarkable 1969 essay on King Lear and of his published readings of Othello and Coriolanus will be delighted to find them together in one volume and complemented by equally challenging commentaries on Antony and Cleopatra, Hamlet, and The Winter's Tale. Shakespeareans who do not already know Cavell's previous work should prepare themselves for a demanding encounter with the most distinctive and powerful voice in contemporary Shakespeare criticism.' Professor Richard P. Wheeler, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign 'Stanley Cavell's essays on Shakespeare - deep, intellectually tenacious, and humane meditations on the nature of artistic genius - are thrilling and essential reading. They illuminate the relation between skepticism and theater, transform the language of literary criticism, and heighten the ethical significance of aesthetic response.' Professor Stephen Greenblatt, University of California, Berkeley

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