Word, Body, Power: A Reading of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar and Ariel Dorfman’s Death and the Maiden
Abstract
This essay explores figurations of the body as the focus of operations of writing aimed at staging effects of power “in action”. To this end, it concentrates on significant (though chronologically and culturally distant) works such as Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar and Ariel Dorfman’s La muerte y la doncella (Death and the Maiden) in order to highlight a range of relevant formal features, semiotic traits, ideological configurations and affective structures. These categories delineate a rhetorical practice in which verbal representations of the body result in an ostension of power as a nexus of gesture and voice, action and speech. In particular, the body functions as a conflict zone, since the two works under examination posit it as a locus of confrontation between effects of power such as coercion and resistance, the concealment and revelation of truth, or masculinity and femininity. Accordingly, these texts offer exemplary instances of how writing the body constitutes an affectively charged performance of the physical as the meeting point of verbal effects and a nucleus of ideological and political agency – a body, in other words, that is both the subject of history and the object of multiple rhetorical operations and negotiations.
Downloads
References
Demos, E. Virginia (ed.), Exploring Affect: The Selected Writings of Silvan S. Tomkins, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1995.
Dorfman, Ariel, Death and the Maiden (1994), London, Nick Hern, 2011.
Foucault, Michel, Il discorso, la storia, la verità: interventi 1969-1984, Ed. Mauro Bertani, Torino, Einaudi, 2001.
Garrington, Abbie, Haptic Modernism: Touch and the Tactile in Modernist Writing, Edinburgh, Edinburgh University Press, 2013.
Gregg, Melissa ‒ Seigworth, Gregory J., “An Inventory of Shimmers”, The Affect Theory Reader, Eds. Melissa Gregg ‒ Gregory J. Seigworth, Durham and London, Duke University Press, 2010: 1-25.
Grunwald, Martin (ed.), Human Haptic Perception: Basics and Applications, Basel-Boston-Berlin, Birkhäuser, 2008.
Kennedy, Milton B., The Oration in Shakespeare, Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina Press, 1942.
Morace, Robert A., “The Life and Times of Death and the Maiden”, Texas Studies in Literature and Language, 42 (2000): 35-53.
Mullini, Roberta, “Play-within-a play-within-a play…: i segni del teatro in Julius Caesar, III.ii”, Julius Caesar: dal testo alla scena, Ed. Mariangela Tempera, Bologna, Clueb, 1992: 125-43.
Phelps, Teresa Godwin, Shattered Voices: Language, Violence, and the Work of Truth Commissions, Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004.
Rostan, Kimberly, “Sweet are the Uses of Tragedy: Death and the Maiden’s ‘Almost Aristotelian’ Testimony”, Atenea, 25 (2005): 9-24.
Sedgwick, Eve Kososfky, Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity, Durham and London, Duke University Press, 2003.
Shakespeare, William, Julius Caesar, ed. T.S. Dorsch (1965), n.e. London, Methuen, 1979.
Velz, John W., “Orator and Imperator in Julius Caesar: Style and the Process of Roman History”, Shakespeare Studies, 15 (1982): 55-75.
Copyright Notice
You are free to copy, distribute and transmit the work, and to adapt the work. You must attribute the work in the manner specified by the author or licensor (but not in any way that suggests that they endorse you or your use of the work).
