The Shakespeare Conference: SHK 17.0675 Wednesday, 18 July 2006
[1] From: V. K. Inman <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.>
Date: Tuesday, 18 Jul 2006 15:38:01 -0400
Subj: Re: SHK 17.0669 Shakespeare and Islam
[2] From: Cary DiPietro <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.>
Date: Wednesday, 19 Jul 2006 06:13:33 +0900
Subj: RE: SHK 17.0669 Shakespeare and Islam
[3] From: Alan Horn <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.>
Date: Wednesday, 19 Jul 2006 02:21:48 -0400
Subj: Re: SHK 17.0669 Shakespeare and Islam
[1]-----------------------------------------------------------------
From: V. K. Inman <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.>
Date: Tuesday, 18 Jul 2006 15:38:01 -0400
Subject: 17.0669 Shakespeare and Islam
Comment: Re: SHK 17.0669 Shakespeare and Islam
Quoting Thomas Le:
>>Cary DiPietro's post raises the question of the origin of the conflict
>>with Islam. It must be found in history dating back to the 11th century
>>with the first Crusade of 1095 led by the French.
V. K.: Much earlier. Try the eight century when Amazight and Arab
warriors overran Spain and invaded France. Or the seventh century when
they overran much of the middle East.
>Other countries of Europe were not participants: England was still
reorganizing after the Norman >Conquest of 1066; Spain was taken up with
the invasion of Muslims from North Africa;
V. K.: No. Spain did not exist as a country at this time. The Amazight
and Arabs conquered the country earlier. At the time of the first
crusade, the petty Christian kingdoms of the Iberian Peninsular were
engaged in the reconquest of Iberia from the petty Arab kingdoms of the
Iberian Peninsular. Toledo fell to Christians in 1085.
>and Germany was torn in internecine war.
>
>Only France, more or less stable under feudalism, had achieved enough
>economic progress, commerce, and confidence to muster resources for a
>foreign adventure. There is not a single cause for the crusade, though
>economic and religious motives underpin the undertaking.
V. K. : A very sweeping generalization and rush to judgment.
>Population
>growth exerted pressure on an economic system ill-suited for expansion.
>Young men under feudalism, and particularly young noblemen, unless
>married advantageously or entered into religious life, had few outlets
>for their energy, and thus were predisposed for adventure.
V. K. : A very sweeping generalization and rush to judgment.
>On the
>religious front, French-born Pope Urban II called the Council of
>Clermont in 1095, in which he exhorted the French knights of the area to
>rescue the Holy Land from the encroachments of the Seljuq Turks, who had
>pushed Islamic influence south and east against the border of Eastern
>Christianity.
V. K. : That would be west and north.
>Setting aside their deep difference, the Byzantine Emperor
>Alexius I Comnenus appealed to their Western brethren,
V. K. : But he did not ask for a crusade against the Seljuk Turks.
>just at the time when France was bursting with energy for foreign
adventure.
V. K. : A very sweeping generalization and rush to judgment.
>Now the Crusade is continuing, with a different twist.
V. K. : Absolutely wrong!!! What is taking place now has nothing to do
with THAT
crusade, and what is happening now is certainly NOT A CRUSADE!!!
>Isn't it ironic
>that God has given oil to Islamic lands and rabid oil consumption to the
>West? Once oil is exhausted, would anyone care about the Middle East and
>what's going on there?
V. K. : Some on the list don't believe in God!
Post such as yours are a waste of time. It would never have flown as an
undergraduate paper or even High School paper in any of my English
classes. I believe that post should be historically accurate and
logically coherent. I don't mind a few spelling and grammatical
inconsistencies, but they should be of the same quality teacher and
professors expect, otherwise we are getting nowhere with this discussion
list.
V. K. Inman
[2]-------------------------------------------------------------
From: Cary DiPietro <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.>
Date: Wednesday, 19 Jul 2006 06:13:33 +0900
Subject: 17.0669 Shakespeare and Islam
Comment: RE: SHK 17.0669 Shakespeare and Islam
Larry Weiss makes the very reasonable point that Shakespeare contains
very few instances of religious anachronism and he very reasonably lays
the onus on scholarship to find evidential proof for the claim that
Aaron represents Shakespeare's possible cultural bias against Islam.
I'm compelled to answer these intelligent counter claims to reiterate my
argument that, though Shakespeare's possible awareness of Islamic
cultures from North Africa and the Levant is not conspicuous, certainly
not in Titus Andronicus, Aaron, by virtue of being a Moor, is
necessarily an Orientalized other and therefore potentially anticipates
in a proto-colonial context similar contemporary constructions of an
Orient in the same or related geographical regions (well, this is
another crux). Such constructions, Elizabethan or contemporary, serve
in addition to narrative and theatrical ends, necessarily political
ends, choose to interpret or ignore them how you will.
However, Weiss very unreasonably takes aim at what he calls my
'rehearsing of hackneyed left-wing polemic' and suggests that SHAKSPER
is not the forum for such discussion. What a disappointing and
irresponsible belittling of perfectly valid critical enquiry. Perhaps
Weiss is retaliating for the admitted sarcasm of my earlier post, itself
irresponsible and unbecoming of scholarly debate, for which I apologize.
But to suggest that a line of enquiry which, however ignorantly, pays
heed to the well-established schools of poststructuralist, Marxist and
postcolonial criticism is nothing more than 'left-wing polemic',
'hackneyed' no less, and has no place on SHAKSPER - well, I think we can
see where this is heading. SHAKSPER does not need such another damaging
marginalization. The only point I'll make in my defence is that I hold
the view that open critical enquiry is or should be possible on
SHAKSPER, enquiry which crosses the boundaries between professional
scholarship, theatrical practice and personal interpretation and which
is not incriminatory, insulting or close-minded. I'm still holding out
for this view, and I hope I'm not alone.
Cary DiPietro
Department of English and Drama
University of Toronto at Mississauga
[3]-------------------------------------------------------------
From: Alan Horn <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.>
Date: Wednesday, 19 Jul 2006 02:21:48 -0400
Subject: 17.0669 Shakespeare and Islam
Comment: Re: SHK 17.0669 Shakespeare and Islam
>How about because it makes a ripping good yarn. What evil capitalistic
>imperialistic ends are served by movies such as "Friday the 13th,"
>beyond making a neat profit?
Larry Weiss would have us believe that stories have no social content.
In support of which he produces the movie "Friday the 13th"-surely the
furthest thing from a "ripping yarn" you can find (unless of course he
intends a pun). Could he have pointed to a more monotonous and
predictable film, or one more ideologically charged? The single,
obsessive function of this horror-fantasy is to work out the guilt that
arises from the sexual repression of youth within the bourgeois family.
The film removes this guilt in fantasy by transferring it to the slasher
antagonist, but only at the cost of his victims' graphically violent
deaths. It's this simultaneous escape from and reaffirmation of the
social code that accounts for the film's appeal.
Alan H.
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