Exploring the intricate relationship between touch and emotion, this work delves into how Shakespeare's plays engage with the senses, particularly the act of touching. It examines the physicality present in his characters' interactions and the profound implications these moments have on themes of connection, intimacy, and human experience. The analysis highlights how touch serves as a powerful vehicle for understanding deeper emotional and philosophical concepts within the context of Shakespeare's timeless works.
„Literature and Weather. Shakespeare – Goethe – Zola“ is dedicated to the relation between literature and weather, i. e. a cultural practice and an everyday phenomenon that has played very different epistemic roles in the history of the world. The study undertakes an archaeology of literature’s affinity to the weather which tells the story of literature’s weathery self-reflection and its creative reinventions as a medium in different epistemic and social circumstances. The book undertakes extensive close readings of three exemplary literary texts: Shakespeare’s The Tempest , Goethe’s The Sufferings of Young Werther and Zola’s The Rougon-Macquarts . These readings provide the basis for reconstructing three distinct formations, negotiating the relationship between literature and weather in the 17th, the 18th and the 19th centuries. The study is a pioneering contribution to the recent debates of literature’s indebtedness to the environment. It initiates a rewriting of literary history that is weather-sensitive; the question of literature’s agency, its power to affect, cannot be raised without understanding the way the weather works in a certain cultural formation.
Is Feminism without the agency of sexed subjects possible? Can the problems of a highly gendered world be formulated and tackled without resorting to the notion of fundamental sexual difference? Is it possible for a Feminism that is not based on the assumption of sexed beings to gain any consistency and follow any concerted strategy? The project of this study is not only to show that all these questions can be answered with a full-hearted – Yes! – but to explore the huge scope of conceptual and also practical possibilities that are created by this change of paradigms. Possibiliti es that are foreclosed – as the first chapters attempt to work out – by Judith Butler’s so important theory of gendered subjects, and limited by Rosi Braidotti ’s or Elizabeth Grosz’s endeavours to read Deleuzian concepts under the assumption of Irigarayan sexual difference. Gilles Deleuze’s and Félix Guattari’s thinking provides us with conceptual tools for a thorough analysis of the status quo – and means for conceptualising resistance that do not perpetuate the power structures it is fighting against. This book is an invitation to get in touch with these tools, join the alliance (no matt er whether ‘queer’ or ‘feminist’) – and ‘Make Rhizomes’!
