Double Anatomy in Early Modern and Postmodern Drama

Fülszöveg

In combining the interpretive methods of poststructuralist semiotics arid iconology, Attila Kiss is able to achieve various feats. He can show, as one of the pivotal theses of his book indicates, that there are several parallels between Early Modern and Postmodern concerns with the self and the subject: not only such well-known Shakespearean pieces as Hamlet, Othello or Titus Andronicus but also 'Renaissance" dramas known mainly in the scholarly world, e.g., Thomas Kyd's The Spanish Tragedy and other dark and violent revenge plays of Elizabethan and Jacobean England, have a lot to say about the "personality" for the twenty-first century Reader and Audience. This fruitful and witty approach, which feels at home both in the late sixteenth — early seventeenth century "arena" — or "private"-pl ay houses, just as much as the ultramodern actors* studios and Dolby stereo movie-theatres of today, works both ways: we get important new insights of such overanalysed plays as Hamlet or... Tovább

Fülszöveg

In combining the interpretive methods of poststructuralist semiotics arid iconology, Attila Kiss is able to achieve various feats. He can show, as one of the pivotal theses of his book indicates, that there are several parallels between Early Modern and Postmodern concerns with the self and the subject: not only such well-known Shakespearean pieces as Hamlet, Othello or Titus Andronicus but also 'Renaissance" dramas known mainly in the scholarly world, e.g., Thomas Kyd's The Spanish Tragedy and other dark and violent revenge plays of Elizabethan and Jacobean England, have a lot to say about the "personality" for the twenty-first century Reader and Audience. This fruitful and witty approach, which feels at home both in the late sixteenth — early seventeenth century "arena" — or "private"-pl ay houses, just as much as the ultramodern actors* studios and Dolby stereo movie-theatres of today, works both ways: we get important new insights of such overanalysed plays as Hamlet or Othello, while we realise that our Postmodern miseries always already got an original — and tragic —reading by Shakespespeare at the Early Modern "dawn" of the period we are still inheritors of
Géza KÁLLAY Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest
Attila Kiss is a co-founder and leading member of a group of established and younger scholars working in the fields of iconography, iconology, and post-structuralist semiotics who in 2001 founded the Research Group for Semiography and Cultural Iconology ^lEGCIS) in the English Department of the University of Szeged. I was lucky to be present to read and hear some of the exciting preliminary findings of the group. I was struck by how rich and useful and suggestive the group's approach was for reading anew texts that had already been subjected to deconstructionist and new historicist treatments. Semiographics struck me at the time as an ideal integration of the best techniques and assumptions of the aforementioned theoretical discourses, but because of its additional concern with visual representations, symbols, iconography, and most importandy perhaps, with the cultural logic(s) of representation, it had the advantage of moving us beyond the "all is text" bias of the first discourse as well as the frequently unsubstantiated historical and epistemological claims that trouble the second.
This book IS a strong and wise contribution to our scholarly and theoretical efforts to understand our "postmodem condition" throu^ the lens of early modern subjectivity.
Jon ROBERTS
Professor of English, Saint Thomas Aquinas College Vissza