The Shakespeare Conference: SHK 18.0830 Thursday, 20 December 2007
[1] From: Evelyn Gajowski <
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Date: Wednesday, 19 Dec 2007 18:37:26 -0800
Subj: Presentism
[2] From: Duncan Salkeld <
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Date: Thursday, 20 Dec 2007 11:37:38 +0000 (GMT)
Subj: Re: SHK 18.0828 Presentism
[1]-----------------------------------------------------------------
From: Evelyn Gajowski <
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Date: Wednesday, 19 Dec 2007 18:37:26 -0800
Subject: Presentism
To all once and future presentists,
For the record, please note that I organized and chaired a research
seminar, "The Presence of Shakespeare and War," at the 35th Annual
Meeting of the Shakespeare Association of America in San Diego last April.
Prof. Adrian Kiernander (of Australia) and I also co-organized and
co-chaired a research seminar, "Performing Shakespeare and Gender in the
Present," at the 8th World Shakespeare Congress in Brisbane, Australia,
in July 2006.
Before that, we organized and co-chaired a research seminar,
"Shakespeare, Gender, and Sexual Orientation in the Present," at the
33rd Annual Meeting of the Shakespeare Association of America in Bermuda
in March 2005.
These seminars were all fully subscribed and involved participants from
many nations around the globe. None of the participants were "acolytes"
of anyone else.
Unlike many posts on this thread, the papers that seminar participants
wrote on these occasions
(1) approached the subject of presentism with an open mind and made
honest attempts at understanding it;
(2) attempted to engage the ideas in recently published research and
scholarship on the subject;
(3) made honest attempts at analyzing Shakespeare's texts through a
presentist lens;
(4) were enlightening.
Are the members of this list who are exhibiting such hostility to
presentism aware of these conferences, which are among the most
significant professional gatherings in the discipline of Shakespeare
studies? Do they attend them? Are they aware of recent publications on
the subject? Do they read them?
Perhaps it is time for a return to a more substantive, deliberative
discussion of the kind offered by the forum of the roundtable. Of
course, participating in such a forum would require actually having read
some of the recently published research and scholarship on the subject
and making an honest attempt to engage with the ideas therein. Perhaps
that's why our original attempt at a roundtable discussion on the
subject earlier this year had fewer participants than the present thread?
Happy Holidays and Happy New Year,
Evelyn Gajowski
Department of English
University of Nevada
[2]-----------------------------------------------------------------
From: Duncan Salkeld <
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Date: Thursday, 20 Dec 2007 11:37:38 +0000 (GMT)
Subject: 18.0828 Presentism
Comment: Re: SHK 18.0828 Presentism
In their introduction to _Presentist Shakespeares_ (Routledge, 2007) - a
lively and shrewd book - Hugh Grady and Terry Hawkes write, 'We choose
the facts. We choose the texts. We do the inserting. We do the
perceiving. We order the priorities which govern everything. Facts and
texts, that is to say, don't simply speak, don't merely mean. We speak,
we mean, by them.' (p. 3). My difficulty with this viewpoint is that it
tends to freeze past and present into different stand-points, or worse,
'entities': the past as passive, silent and inert; the present as
active, vocal, flexible, and theoretically sophisticated. Almost ten
years ago, in a SHAKSPER thread on 'Presentism', David Lindley urged
that in ways large or small, 'the past talks back and refuses,
repudiates, or wriggles out from under the constructions we put upon it.
. . .'. Taking reconstructions of the Globe as an example, he argued
that, 'attempts to reconstruct the Globe theatre have been significantly
affected by the culture within which the reconstructions were attempted
(see any sequence of drawings of The Globe); but, surely, it must be
true that the more detailed and accurate the archeological and other
evidence upon which such reconstructions are based, the less scope for
such variation there might be.
Hugh Grady, in his essay in the above volume, goes some way towards
acknowledging the point. He writes that "In art there is always a
renewability within the flux of time that creates a complex kind of
temporality negotiating between past and present" (p. 161).
In line with David Lindley's point, my response re: Presentism
(developed in a chapter forthcoming) is that critics today are, in
however minimal a way, indebted to past inscriptions, and those
inscriptions qualify, shape and condition what may reasonably be made of
them today. Aby Warburg's phrase 'Das Nachleben Der Antike' ('the
survival/agency of antiquity') fits the argument usefully, I like to
think. But should that sound too abstruse, I'll close with a joke.
In Plautus's Bacchides (c.200 BCE), Pistoclerus shakes his fist at
Parasite and threatens to give him 'one of these toothcrackers'. The
original for 'toothcracker' in the Latin text is 'dentifrangibula'.
Duncan Salkeld
Department of English
The University of Chichester
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