Blind Spots of Knowledge in Shakespeare and His World A Conversation - Studies in Medieval and Early Modern Culture

A "blind spot" suggests an obstructed view, or partisan perception, or a localized lack of understanding. Just as the brain "reads" the "blind spot" of the visual field by a curious process of readjustment, Shakespearean drama disorients us with moments of unmastered and unmasterable knowledge, recasting the way we see, know and think about knowing. Focusing on such moments of apparent obscurity, this volume puts methods and motives of knowing under the spotlight, and responds both to inscribed acts of blind-sighting, and to the text or action blind-sighting the reader or spectator. While tracing the hermeneutic yield of such occlusion is its main conceptual aim, it also embodies a methodological innovation: structured as an internal dialogue, it aims to capture, and stake out a place for, a processive intellectual energy that enables a distinctive way of knowing in academic life; and to translate a sense of intellectual "community" into print.

The authors of this remarkable book share their research, ideas, questions, and stories with each other. The contributors are critical and creative about their own blind spots and in their collective work on how blindness of many kinds makes seeing and knowing possible in the first place. Readers will find themselves surprised and delighted by the essays, responses, and dialogues that unfold in the book. Blind Spots of Knowledge in Shakespeare and his World: A Conversation is serious intellectual play of the highest order.

--Paul Yachnin, Tomlinson Professor of Shakespeare Studies, McGill University

What does it mean to see we can't see, to know we are in the process of failing to know? The subtle and deeply informed essays in this book address these and related questions by turning toShakespeare, and especially to Othello, Twelfth Night, The Winter's Tale andThe Tempest. They also take up issues like misquotation,machine translation and extreme violence that is supposed to make us laugh. The book is not only intriguing in its own right, it opens all kinds of doors to further thought. What's at stake is well caught in a note by Maurice Merleau-Ponty, quoted in the work itself: 'to see is always to see more than one sees'.

--Michael Wood, Professor of English and Comparative Literature, Emeritus, Princeton University