The Shakespeare Conference: SHK 18.0151 Thursday, 15 February 2007
[1] From: Gabriel Egan <
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Date: Tuesday, 13 Feb 2007 17:06:11 -0000
Subj: Re: SHK 18.0143 A Question
[2] From: Jeffrey Jordan <
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Date: Tuesday, 13 Feb 2007 13:29:41 -0600
Subj: Re: SHK 18.0143 A Question
[3] From: Peter Bridgman <
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Date: Tuesday, 13 Feb 2007 22:30:30 -0000
Subj: Re: SHK 18.0143 A Question
[4] From: Terence Hawkes <
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Date: Wednesday, 14 Feb 2007 11:52:31 -0000
Subj: Re: SHK 18.0134 A Question
[5] From: John Drakakis <
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Date: Wednesday, 14 Feb 2007 15:57:30 -0000
Subj: RE: SHK 18.0134 A Question
[1]-----------------------------------------------------------------
From: Gabriel Egan <
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Date: Tuesday, 13 Feb 2007 17:06:11 -0000
Subject: 18.0143 A Question
Comment: Re: SHK 18.0143 A Question
Norman Myers asks
>In TWENTY FIVE WORDS OR LESS,
>what is presentism?
To judge from what has been written on this list, I would offer:
Presentism is incredulity towards historiography's capacity to apprehend
the past in the past's own terms and celebration of inevitably
apprehending the past in today's terms.
>Perhaps I should add that no single
>word may contain more than three
>syllables.
Don't be a philistine.
Gabriel Egan
[2]-------------------------------------------------------------
From: Jeffrey Jordan <
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Date: Tuesday, 13 Feb 2007 13:29:41 -0600
Subject: 18.0143 A Question
Comment: Re: SHK 18.0143 A Question
Replying to Norman Myers:
>In TWENTY FIVE WORDS OR LESS, what is presentism?
If an article has a colon in the title, it's presentism.
>Perhaps I should add that no single word may contain more
>than three syllables.
Hey, no fair. PRES - ENT - IS - M.
[3]-------------------------------------------------------------
From: Peter Bridgman <
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Date: Tuesday, 13 Feb 2007 22:30:30 -0000
Subject: 18.0143 A Question
Comment: Re: SHK 18.0143 A Question
Norman Myers writes ...
>In TWENTY FIVE WORDS OR LESS, what is presentism?
I gather it is the opposite of historicism. In which case it would mean
studying old texts only with reference to their present day meaning.
25 exactly.
>should add that no single word may contain more than three syllables.
Oops. I had historicism and ridiculous.
Peter Bridgman
[4]-------------------------------------------------------------
From: Terence Hawkes <
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Date: Wednesday, 14 Feb 2007 11:52:31 -0000
Subject: 18.0134 A Question
Comment: Re: SHK 18.0134 A Question
Professor Norman Myers is rightfully scathing in his denunciation of
presentism:
'I'm also amazed (and amused) to see that, so far, none of the
contributors has mentioned the implications of all this for PRODUCTION
AND PERFORMANCE. After all, wasn't Shakespeare (excluding the sonnets
and narrative poems) first and foremost a maker of plays? It seems to
me that production at any given time, including the very first
performances, would be the ultimate in "presentism."'
I apologise for my oversight. To meet the point I have arranged, by
magical means, that the following passage will immediately appear in all
past, current and future editions of my Shakespeare in the Present.
'Placing emphasis on the present can't help but connect fruitfully with
the current realignment of critical responses that stresses the
performance of a play as much as its 'reference': that looks at what the
play does, here and now in the theatre, as well as -or even against-
what it says in terms of the world to which its written text refers.
Presentism thus highlights what has been termed drama's 'performative'
function: a feature that always operates concurrently with, and perhaps
as a modification of, its referential function.'
It is on page 5.
T. Hawkes
[5]-------------------------------------------------------------
From: John Drakakis <
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Date: Wednesday, 14 Feb 2007 15:57:30 -0000
Subject: 18.0134 A Question
Comment: RE: SHK 18.0134 A Question
I see that this is another example of 2 cultures separated by a
language. The irony from this side of the pond is that we don't do
barricades anymore!
Anyway, to more serious matters since the issue is a serious one. It
really does matter that we have some sense of what the Enlightenment is
and which thinkers it includes. This was the burden of my original set
of questions to Joe Egert that he didn't answer. I'm still puzzling over
how you designate yourself as a 'reactionary' Joe. If you are reacting
to 'theory' then tell us which 'theory' and we can take the debate further.
Because 'presentism' is a relatively new concept surely we need to
understand the intellectual undergrowth that it has emerged from. There
is a debate to be had here between a Heideggerian understanding of the
present and 'dasein' and the more classic Marxist understanding that
seeks to locate 'dasein' in a much larger social context. We need also
to consider this debate within the larger debate within and about the
state of Marxism simply because this is the critical discourse that is
most easily shaped to addressing in the most efficient way, these
issues. And here I emphasise MarxISM (that is to say the ongoing debate
around dialectics, materialist thinking, the critiques of liberalism
etc.) That gives us a conceptual framework within which to situate the
practice of reading in general, and of reading Shakespeare in
particular. Old style untheorised liberal thinking doesn't have very
much to offer here by way of conceptual advancement and it doesn't take
us very far, and conservative retrenchment simply won't do. Revisionist
currents within Marxisante thinking are another matter altogether, and
I'm not sure where Egert stands in relation to this. In other words,
where is his reactionary stance coming from? Joe, let's have an answer
to the first set of questions first and then we can move on.
As to Professor Myers' more recent posting on performance and
presentism, may I respectfully suggest that he actually reads Hawkes'
collection AND Hawkes' monograph a little more closely. The time for
passing books under one's nose, sampling the air, and (as Tristram
Shandy would say) riding one's tit with more sobriety, is long gone.
Cheers,
John Drakakis
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