上财外语明思讲坛|Hamlet and the Failure of Consolation

This lecture will be co-hosted by the Literature Team of the School of Foreign Studies and the SUFE Centre for the Study of Text and Print Culture

 讲座摘要/ Abstract 

In this lecture – related to my forthcoming book Literature and Consolation. Fictions of Comfort (Edinburgh University Press, 2021) – I will focus on two scenes from Hamlet. In discussing them, I want to suggest how Shakespeare’s understanding of consolation is based on a thorough knowledge of classical theories of the topic, in which it is taken for granted that the practice is always successful. Shakespeare, in contrast, shows us the failure of consolation. This failure, as I see it, is related to a heightened awareness of the duplicity of rhetoric and to the new, early modern understanding of the individual self. Shakespeare’s characters fail to be comforted because they are no longer convinced that their inner experiences relate unproblematically to the common sense ideal upon which classical theories of consolation were traditionally founded. As I will argue, Shakespeare’s analysis of the phenomenon is indicative of a modern regime of consolation, in which the difficulty and ultimate ‘impossibility’ of giving and finding comfort (Hans Blumenberg) are central.

 主讲人简介/ CV 

Jürgen Pieters is Professor of Literary Theory and Early Modern Dutch Literature and he teaches courses in general literature at Ghent University, Belgium. He is the author of, among other books, Moments of Negotiation: The New Historicism of Stephen Greenblatt (Amsterdam UP, 2001), Speaking with the Dead: Explorations in Literature and History (Edinburgh UP, 2005), and the forthcoming Literature and Consolation: Fictions of Comfort (Edinburgh UP 2021).