The Fragmentation of the Proper Name and the Crisis of Degree: Deconstructing King Lear

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LIT Verlag Münster, 2004 - Literary Criticism - 132 pages
This book is a rich interpretation of a rich text, providing a twenty-first century reading of a timeless masterpiece, and, in so doing, it points to the relationship of death and desire as a playing both with body and language. The book confronts readers with the ineluctable patterns which language and time inscribe within the open/closed Shakespearean space: Degree, division, and diversity as the focal points. Emphasis upon the corporeality of the human body links this study's textual interpretation with the corpus of the literary canon, itself seen as a body divided by performance and differed by reading. It prevails over the damaging engagement with the deconstructed text and dominates the conflictual tendencies of the reconstructed drama.

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Contents

III
5
IV
35
V
109

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Page 9 - The heavens themselves, the planets, and this centre, Observe degree, priority, and place, Insisture, course, proportion, season, form, Office, and custom, in all line of order...
Page 10 - Lear. Meantime we shall express our darker purpose. — Give me the map there. — Know that we have divided In three our kingdom : and 'tis our fast intent To shake all cares and business from our age ; Conferring them on younger strengths, while we Unburden'd crawl toward death. — Our son of Cornwall, And you, our no less loving son of Albany, We have this hour a constant will to publish Our daughters' several dowers, that future strife May be prevented now.
Page 7 - tis fittest. Cor. How does my royal lord? How fares your majesty? Lear. You do me wrong, to take me out o' the grave. — Thou art a soul in bliss ; but I am bound Upon a wheel of fire, that mine own tears Do scald like molten lead.

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