@article{Kottman_2014, title={"The Charm Dissolves Apace": Shakespeare and the Self-dissolution of Drama}, url={https://rosa.uniroma1.it/rosa03/memoria_di_shakespeare/article/view/11787}, abstractNote={<div class="page" title="Page 2"><div class="layoutArea"><div class="column"><p><span>In this essay, I argue that Shakespeare – perhaps the world’s pre-eminent dramatist – stages, from within his drama, the self-dissolution of our need for the sensuous, material representation of human actions in order to understand ourselves as actors, as free self-determining agents in the world. The depiction of our lessening need for sensuous representational drama becomes, itself, a primary task of Shakespearean drama – as if being a dramatist, for Shakespeare, means making the historical disappearance of the conditions under which traditional (sensuous, representational) forms of drama </span><span>matter into the very stuff of a dramatic work. Building on these claims, I sug</span><span>gest that Shakespearean drama offers an alternative future for modernism to </span><span>the one presented in recent philosophical work on modernist art. Precisely because Shakespeare’s artistic horizons are less limited than other modernist movements – his dramatic work is not nearly as restricted (not nearly as precious, some might say) as Cage’s or Pollock’s – it is to Shakespeare’s radical </span><span>modernism that we might turn to find a more capacious future for art (and, hence, for philosophical reflection on art) beyond both its sensuous and its </span><span>representational form. </span></p> <p><span><strong>Keywords</strong>: </span><span>Hegel, </span><span>The Tempest</span><span>, Aristotle, Aesthetics </span></p></div></div></div>}, number={1}, journal={Memoria di Shakespeare. A Journal of Shakespearean Studies}, author={Kottman, Paul A.}, year={2014}, month={Mar.} }