Does philosophy gain or lose when it is embedded within literature or embodied by drama? Does literary criticism gain or lose when it turns to literary works as occasions for abstract reflection? Leading literary scholars and philosophers interrogate philosophical dimensions of Shakespeare's Hamlet with these urgent questions in view. Scholars probe Hamlet's own insights, assess the significance of philosophy's literary-dramatic framing by this play, and trace the philosophically-relevant underpinnings revealed by historical transformations in Hamlet's reception. They focus on the play's thematizations of subjectivity, knowledge, sex, grief, self-theatricalization. Examining Shakespeare's play from a philosophical standpoint sharpens the questions the play itself so famously poses: What counts as a proper response to injustice upon realizing that whatever one does, there can be no undoing of the initial wrong? What do our commitments to the dead amount to? How to persist in infusing significance into action while grasping the degradation of death and our own replaceability? Scholars at the forefront of their fields tackle these and other questions from a wide range of viewpoints, illuminating the central concerns of one of Shakespeare's masterpieces.

About the Author
Tzachi Zamir is Associate Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Zamir is the author of Double Vision: Moral Philosophy and Shakespearean Drama (Princeton, 2006), Ethics and the Beast (Princeton, 2007), and Acts: Theater, Philosophy and the Performing Self (The University of Michigan Press, 2014). He is also the author of Ascent: Philosophy and Paradise Lost, forthcoming from Oxford University Press.

Reviews
so blithe and smart that it deserves to be adopted in every classroom. Its magic owes to a rare sense of shared purpose and shared tone. * Ellen MacKay, Studies in English Literature *



Book Information
ISBN 9780190698522
Author Tzachi Zamir
Format Paperback
Page Count 296
Imprint Oxford University Press Inc
Publisher Oxford University Press Inc
Weight(grams) 340g
Dimensions(mm) 206mm * 137mm * 20mm