Year: 2017
Type: book-review
Abstract: Nicole Miller's Violence and Grace sets a handful of plays by Shakespeare as well as a few works by his contemporaries (Marlowe's Edward II and Middleton's The Revenger's Tragedy) in dialogue with a wide range of twentieth-century political thinkers to explore violence inflicted on those targeted for reasons of gender and sexuality.The book's ultimate goal is to bring humanities scholarship into active political engagement with contemporary issues of gender-based violence.Many will no doubt come to this book primarily for its readings of early modern dramatic literature.Miller's interpretive skills are sophisticated and meticulous and her readings are engaging and often convincing.Her focus on political philosophy allows her to bring fresh ideas and ways of seeing to oftenglossed works-as when she brings notions of "bare life" and the body in pain to her analysis of the way Katherine suffers in The Taming of the Shrew.What interests me in Miller's book, however, is not so much its specific acts of literary criticism as its more general project; she offers a striking example of a genre of highly intellectualized and erudite humanities scholarship such as perhaps would seem more characteristic of a period from the recent past: the heyday of theoretically-inflected work.Miller engages, sometimes extensively, with a truly impressive array of politico-theological thinkers from the twentieth century and earlier: Agamben, Arendt, Aristotle, Badiou, Bataille, Benjamin, Butler, Cicero, Derrida, Freud, Frye, Hegel, Heidegger, Kantorowicz, Levinas, Marx, Mauss, Nietzsche, St. Paul, Schmitt, Weber, Weil-to name only the most prominent.Anyone lamenting the waning of the theoretical turn in literary criticism might take succour and pleasure from this book.Like much theoretically-informed criticism, Miller's work is dense sometimes to the point of opacity.She embraces a difficult and gnarled prose style which sometimes, I suspect, is not really susceptible to straightforward explication.Moreover, she errs, especially in her footnotes, on the side of pursuing ideas somewhat further than seems immediately relevant, at the expense of a more focused and streamlined argument.
Source: Renaissance and Reformation
Language: English
Subfield: Classics
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: bronze
OpenAlex ID: W2594379481