An Interpretation of Hamlet Based on Recent Developments in Cognitive Studies

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Year:
Pages:108
ISBN:0-7734-7622-9
978-0-7734-7622-6
Price:$119.95 + shipping
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Monograph re-examines the role of emotion in Hamlet in the light of recent developments in cognitive science. The examination of the emotion-cognition fugue in Hamlet, with a particular emphasis on the prince’s emotional responses to physical and material phenomena, stresses the experiential aspects of ideology, and scrutinizes the ways in which the fugue illuminates the complex variations in the processing of ideology. This focus also positions the play in the ongoing social drama in which Elizabethan theatre, along with ceremony, ritual, carnival and other discourses of power, played a vital role.

Reviews

“Professor Tamaya adds, in this study of the play, yet another significant, thought-provoking and compelling approach to Hamlet, an approach which effectively brings intellectual scholarship on the play into the twenty-first century. . . . Not only does her study break new ground by using a contemporary cognitive studies approach to reexamine an oft-studied work, but it also effectively addresses the relationship of this approach to other major schools of Shakespearean criticism, and it relates the approach to the cultural influences at work when the play was written, particularly the artistic theatrical interest in revenge tragedy and the philosophical fascination with melancholy that shape the content of the play. Finally, all of this is accomplished in a jargon-free, lucid prose that Professor Tamaya has exhibited in her previous writings. . . ” – Robert Bishoff

Table of Contents

Table of contents:
Foreword by Robert Bishoff
Preface; Introduction
1. Hamlet and the “richness of the real”
2. Hamlet and Mediated Reality
3. Hamlet as Homo Ludens
4. Hamlet’s Expressive Style
Bibliography; Index

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