ENG 620--Shakespeare at the Movies--The Hermeneutics and Poetics of Hamlet on Film

“The substance of Hamlet’s tragedy is his delay” in taking action (139). Even when he is offered a perfect opportunity to enact his revenge, such as in Act 3, Scene iii, he finds a rationalization for not following through. Were Hamlet to kill his uncle at that moment, Claudius would surely go to Heaven because he is praying. This flimsy excuse displays Hamlet’s paralysis. “Hamlet is obsessed with his own motivation” (140). This paralysis-by-analysis forms the core of the play—a puzzle that has confounded critics for centuries, and, as Robert Crosman writes in his book, The World’s a Stage: Shakespeare and the Dramatic View of Life, “of all famous, controversy-generating classics, Hamlet seems preeminent in the amount of critical scrutiny that it has been subjected to, and for a variety of ‘meanings,’ many of them incompatible with each other, that interpreters have found in it” (140).

The work of directors, such as Kenneth Branagh, Lawrence Olivier, or Michael Almereyda, in adapting Hamlet from Shakespeare’s text to the silver screen is comparable to that of literary critics. They must address the puzzle central to the play. They must decide why Hamlet delays his revenge plot. They must grapple with Hamlet’s weighty self-analysis, and decide what lay behind his “meditat[ions] on the nature of existence” (Crosman 140). Furthermore, they must create visual imagery that expresses the rationale behind his verbose, often internal, ruminations.

In a film, addressing such questions means developing visual imagery that is both creative and analytical. On the one hand, a screen adaptation must justify its existence in the pantheon of Hamlet productions, including thousands upon thousands of stage adaptations and a myriad of big screen adaptations that cut up Shakespeare’s text in order to present a more palatable and shorter version of the four hour plus tome to live audiences. All adaptations aim at restricting the work in order to present the central puzzle of the play as the director sees it, and the way in which a particular director sees Hamlet must be unique. There is little point in redressing Olivier’s interpretation with different actors. The director’s interpretation of the play itself must be different than what has previously transpired. A Shakespearean director must distinguish him or herself, while giving due to the original work, as well as similar work that has gone before. Briefly, a Shakespearean director must provide a hermeneutical interpretation of the text.
On the other hand, a screen adaptation must grapple with the difficulties inherent in presenting a text written for the stage on the big screen. They must develop cinematic tropes in order to present the central puzzle of the play. These visual tropes must be unique in order for the interpretation to be successful, though they should also be in some way familiar to the audience. Often times directors of Shakespearean films or plays draw on successful elements in past productions created by other directors, though sometimes these intertextual forays read as a response to another Shakespearean or cinematic work as in an dialogue or pastiche rather than a direct homage or parroting of the other work. In any case, these visual tropes must represent and stem from the director’s unique interpretation of the Shakespearean text. The hermeneutical act must be melded to the poetic creation: a successful screen adaptation combines a unique interpretation of a text with the creation of a cathartic representation of the narrative.

Whether changing the space or time, altering the play’s setting is a common tactic employed by directors in distinguishing his or her visual tropes from previous interpretations. These decisions reflect the ideological framework that gives rise to Hamlet’s musings. For example, Almereyda set his adaptation in turn of the 21st century New York, and he presented Hamlet’s existential crisis in a time where contemporary philosophical study was often embroiled in the conflict between modernist and postmodernist theory. Released in 2000, over a decade after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the purported victory of capitalism over communism in the former Soviet Union—following the failed 1991 coup (which aimed at reversing Gorbachev’s democratic and capitalistic project of reform), even the staunchest modernist critic of modernism’s failings, Karl Marx, was declared a failure by popular media. In the 21st century, names like Derrida and Foucault riddle graduate humanities classrooms, and theorists like Baudrillard hold sway over the plots of high-concept action movies like The Matrix. Almereyda’s contemporary setting posits Hamlet into this philosophical imbroglio.

For his part, Branagh chooses to position Hamlet in the 19th century, the advent of modernist philosophy, where names like Hegel, Marx, and Nietzsche held sway. While giving lip service to romantic epic films Dr. Zhivago, which featured similar settings, Branagh’s setting roots Hamlet’s philosophical crisis firmly in the modernist epoch. The skirmishes over national boundaries as an empirical measurement of nationhood, highlighted in Branagh’s depiction of Fortinbras and the clash between Norway and Denmark, a thread that weaves through Shakespeare’s play and Branagh’s film, became international issues leading inexorably to world war in 1914. Branagh’s setting posits Hamlet in the historical preamble to such skirmishes.
A thorough going analysis of the historical issues pertaining to the time period in which an adaptation takes place as well as the philosophical debate relevant to the time are necessities in examining Hamlet’s paralysis-by-analysis, in order to understand what the various cinematic adaptations mean and how audiences relate to these adaptations. Each adaptation recasts Hamlet in a different vein and audience response to this character is shaped by the decisions of the director. It isn’t simply a question of which Hamlet is most like Shakespeare’s Hamlet, as each interpretation is more or less valid. The central question revolves around why one Hamlet relates to certain viewers while another Hamlet does not.

ENG 680--Oratory, Community and the Rhetorical Event--Wiki Entries

The following entries were co-authored for a Rhetoric wiki we're using in the class. Undergraduates in Dr. Morris' History of Rhetoric course also participate in constructing the wiki. I'm only reprinting those entries where I offered the lion's share of the text, not all the entries I contributed to.

Corax & Tisias
Note: Corax and Tisias are included in the section on Greek rhetors because of their sphere of influence according to our current interpretation of history, not because of ethnic origins.


Very little is known about Corax and Tisias. Some scholars believe that they existed in a teacher student relationship. Others believed they were merely figures of legend. Still others believe they were the same person. The prevailing belief is that Tisias was Corax's student. While their exact history is murky, their work in rhetoric attributed to them is important. Corax and Tisias show that a systematic study of rhetoric, at least in an embryonic form, predates the mid-early 5th century BC (450 is cited as the start of the sophistic period) and the roots of rhetoric and its formal study may extend beyond Athens--Corax and Tisias were from Syracuse. It is believed that Corax and Tisias moved to Athens and became the teachers of Isocrates and Lysias among others.

Corax used rhetoric to help common citizens fight the tyrannical Thrasybulus. His rhetoric enabled oppressed citizens to successfully argue in court to protect their property rights. Tisias was not only an early rhetoric teacher, he was a theorist as well. He argued that forensic speeches were divided into four parts: the prologue, narrative, argument, and the epilogue, and he devoted his study to the formulation of arguments.

They are both mentioned in writings by later Sophists. Aristotle, in Synagoge Technon (Collection of Arts), summarized an early handbook produced by one of the two Sicilians, and in Plato’s Phaedrus Tisias is referred to as one who had written about the “art of words.”

In Plato’s Phaedrus, Socrates attacks Tisias (and Gorgias) for honoring probabilities more than truth and making “small things appear great and great things appear small by the power of speech” (31). Gagarin argues that Tisias’ focus on arguments did not exclude but examined the various possibilities when truth was impossible to determine. Gagarin’s defense of Tisias exposes Plato’s dogmatism.


Source: "Background and Origins: Oratory and Rhetoric Before the Sophists" by Michael Gagarin from A Companion to Greek Rhetoric by Ian Worthington ISBN: 9781405125512


Epideictic
Epideictic is a Greek word which means “fit for display” and refers to ceremonial, demonstrative, and didactic rhetoric. It generally applies to speeches given during public occasions, and is meant either to praise or to place blame on someone or something. The tradition of epideictic oratory includes both encomia and invectives. According to Aristotle, both virtue, or Arete, and vice are highly pertinent to epideictic oratory.

Modern scholars have expanded this notion of epideictic rhetoric to encompass the underlying assumptions of a given culture. The rhetorician Andreea Ritivoi calls upon Paul Ricoeur's sense of epideixis as the "nature of the discursive efforts needed to gather a community around shared values and to convince us to subscribe to certain visions of the past, present, or future" (97). Through Ritivoi's reading of Ricoeur, ceremonial, demonstrative, and didactic rhetoric work to provide examplars for right action. These exemplars and the common values that they embody become the invisible bonds, or what Ritivoi calls "the sical glue," that binds a community together and make it predictable.

Redefining the term through the Ritivoi/Ricoeur lens, we see that epideixis is concerned with “something that is not actually happening in front of [our] eyes,” but stems from probablities that are spatial, socially and historically contingent, and where “the rhetorical imagination becomes the link between an existing and a preferred state of affairs” (Ritivoi 54). Epideixis employs the narrative of history in order to remake the "social" glue and redefine national identity because “even the worst moments in a community’s past can be used to reinforce an ideality, because the component of blame in epideictic discourse has the same function as that of praise—to signal the irreducible gap between a particular group of people and the abstract principles and values organizing their sense of themselves as a community” (20).

Addressing “history requires an interpretive effort” (17), and Ritivoi argues that this in a hermeneutical act. Through epideixis historical events are treated as a text and only certain elements of a past event are resurrected. From the standpoint that past events are singular in that they will never happen in the same place, time, and/or manner again, connecting a past event to current crises is not simply an act of remembrance but an interpretive act representing an ideology.

For Ritivoi and Riceour, epideixis transgresses the boundaries between the disciplines, between rhetoric and hermeneutics. It isn't simply reserved for the encomium or the panegyric, but the form of oratory that shapes nationhood and national identity, which reforges the doxa on which such ideas rest. Furthermore, it informs deliberative and forensic rhetoric. Without understanding the doxa of a society, it is impossible to construct persuasive oratory aimed at making political or judicial decisions.


Sources:
Conley, Thomas M. Rhetoric in the European Tradition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990.

“Epideictic Oratory” http://rhetoric.byu.edu/Branches%20of%20Oratory/Epideictic.htm

Ritivoi, Andreea. Paul Ricoeur: Tradition and Innovation in Rhetorical Theory. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2006.


Homer & Hesiod
Descriptions of speeches in Homer’s epic poem The Iliad do not differentiate between content and style, though the impact of oratory at the time of the poem is clear: effective leadership was tied to effective speaking.

Hesiod, a Greek oral poet whose work is dated to 700 BC (or earlier), argued that a king needed the ability to judge, that is to settle disputes, and he described this ability as “having the gift of the muses.” While it may be inaccurate to say that the formal study of speech-making existed as far back as 700 BC, the necessity of speech-making existed long before the accepted advent of Rhetoric (450 BC).

The work of both Homer and Hesiod displays the significance of public oratory in Ancient Greece prior to the sophists and shows that deliberative, forensic and epideictic oratory flourished for hundreds of years before the sophists.

Source: "Background and Origins: Oratory and Rhetoric Before the Sophists" by Michael Gagarin from A Companion to Greek Rhetoric by Ian Worthington ISBN: 9781405125512

ENG 685--Spatial Rhetorics--You Can't Polsih a Turd

Chapter 4, “On the Park—A Vision of the Future of Work?,” from Doreen Massey’s High-tech Fantasies: Science Parks in Society, Science, and Space deals with science parks as an emerging form of occupational organization. Science parks themselves refer to their workspaces as “organic,” marked by “open” organizational structures, and flexible hours, where the employees’ love for their work dominates the space rather than “mechanistic” hierarchies imposed from above. The purveyors of such parks argue that their work ethic is based on “cooperative individualism” and they draw the best and brightest individuals who are “self-motivated” and not afraid of work.

Massey examines the rhetoric of the science park against empirical data culled from surveys conducted within and outside the parks. Much of it cuts against the grain of the rhetoric. For example, when the upper echelons of the parks talk about work flexibility, they are talking about the workers being flexible with donating time to their work (largely salaried employees) rather than the workers being free to not work whenever they feel like not working. Massey addresses their flexibility citing that despite hours being flexible, social pressure demands that workers show up at least 8 hours a day. Additionally, many of the employees in the science parks are freelance, which means they do not receive benefits.

Much of the rhetoric of the science park elites reads as exploitation vaguely covered by new management buzzwords and self-help bombast. Massey discusses how employees have virtually no social life and rely on others to pick up their slack in the private sphere, i.e., maids who cook and clean for the employees. Furthermore, the anecdote about the female engineer being turned into a secretary in her office because of the proximity of her desk to the office door cuts against the grain of the science park rhetoric that argues their structure is wholly different from the more traditional (and possibly blatantly exploitative structure of modernist workplaces).

Massey undercuts the idea that social relations and practices change simply from altering how we think or feel about a space. The rhetoric of the science park is incapable of addressing social inequities based on gender or class. Massey talks about how the physical laborers at the science park maintain the same work structure that their counterparts outside the park maintain. (She refers to the cleaners at one office who were denied the benefits entertained by engineers because the managers thought the cleaning people were exploiting the system—re: lazy.) In the end, the relation between the workers and the managers or owners was not the measure of a park’s success. “The Success of the park was seen entirely in terms of the property—the value of the land had been ‘colossally increased’” (100).

Despite the attempt to polish the science park to a glossy sheen via flashy new terms and the auspices of greater freedom, “the timing of projects (by supervisors, or not), the fact that deadlines and keeping to them are an important mode of composition between firms, the high degree of freelancing, all impose a discipline of their own without the need for formal controls. At its crudest, such a work ethic is associated with a desperately competitive individualism” (108). Cooperative individualism is an oxymoron. Flexibility connotes bending in both ways. And, as the well-known proverb states, “you can’t polish a turd,” but to paraphrase John Paul Getty, you had better spread it around so it doesn’t stink.

Statement of Purpose for a TA position in English at UAA

Dear sir or madam:

Theory and practice bookended my undergraduate studies in Professional Writing and New Media. Courses in Rhetoric, Poetics, Technical Writing, and Editing were supplemented with workshops, blog discussions, and collaborative projects involving text, digital audio/video, and still images presented by graphical user interfaces designed in Dreamweaver and Flash. Aristotle augmented by Janet H. Murray, Barthes melded with the Macromedia Flash Handbook, and they all sat around a lake house in the Adirondacks roasting marshmallows and reading poetry. The circle-spirit of the workshop was melded to the solitary act of writing, and my undergraduate career was aimed at fostering a vibrant community both on and offline alongside the individual practice of developing my writing.

Furthermore, I supplemented my degree curriculum with a position at Neo-Vox, the State University of New York (SUNY), College at Cortland’s online, student magazine. As Art Director, I worked with a staff of student-artists tasked with adding visual content to contributed text. Also, I maintained the ezine’s website. As the President and Managing Editor of the Cortland Writers’ Association, a group of student-writers charged with the task of planning biannual writers’ retreats and the yearly production of the two State University of New York (SUNY) Cortland writing journals (Transitions and She Said, She Said), I found spaces where student writers could test out and develop their voices in front of an audience. In my senior year I co-founded the Indie Media Club, an organization that brought diverse culture and media, including speakers, musicians, poets, and bands, from around the country to the Cortland community. The circle-spirit of my degree program was bolstered by my involvement with the Cortland community and “extracurricular activities.”

After graduation I took a position as an editorial assistant with the American Journal of Botany (AJB). At AJB I received an inside view of the peer review journal process. From dealing with author correspondence and manuscript editing to correcting galley proofs, my work at AJB was a hard lesson in the solitary and thankless nature of editorial work. While I’d received a hands-on training in professional editing and proofreading, I traded the sense of community I had at Cortland working with other student-writers in developing our craft for a dusty desk, some comma splices, and countless misplace modifiers.

Continuing my studies at UAA on the graduate level, some of that sense of community is returning. I’ve worked in the writing center for the past two semesters, mostly with PRPE, ESL, and ENG 111 students who are trying to balance their voices with the demands of academic assignments while minimizing grammatical and formal errors. I am excited by the prospect of a TA position as it brings together the inexorable bookends of my academic and professional experience: theory and praxis, as well as the communal and solitary aspects of composition. This experience is not limited to the classroom, but creates other, collaborative relationships within the graduate program itself. A TA position would off me the chance to add another dimension to my graduate work through working alongside my peers, fellow graduate students who are embroiled in developing curricula, lesson plans, and grading rubrics, and addressing the practical implications of pedagogical theory.

As per your request, I’ve enclosed my resume, two letters of reference, a copy of my undergraduate transcripts, and the answers to the two questions posed in the TA application form. Thank you for considering my application. I look forward to hearing from you.


Respectfully,


Donald C. Unger

ENG 620--Shakespeare at the Movies--Nothing Made of Quite Alot

Hero and Claudio are exemplary models for their genders. From Claudio playing the part of the honorable schoolboy who worships from a far and has his superior, Don Pedro, carry out the actual wooing of Hero, to the vary manner in which Hero carries herself, as a demure and respectful maiden who’s persona is virtually non-existent until her virtue is called into question: Hero and Claudio never question their assigned gender roles. They embrace them.

Beatrice and Benedick are on the other end of the spectrum. They actively shirk off their assigned roles, but they don’t do it by accepting another role for themselves. They shirk their roles by constantly jibing the other sex for not fulfilling his/her role. The play is filled with Beatrice’s slurs against men and Benedick’s vexation with women and it is highlighted in Kenneth Branagh’s cinematic adaptation. Branagh’s film begins with Beatrice reciting Balthasar’s “Sigh no more, ladies” song from Act II, scene iii. From the opening of the film, we know Beatrice’s take on men. They are fraudulent and inconstant. They are inadequate in performing their roles. On the other hand, the line Shakespeare uses to introduce Benedick underlines the character’s distrusting nature of women. Benedick turns a flip remark into an interrogation of Leonato’s wife’s chastity. Both Beatrice and Benedick devote much of their time and energy toward attacking the other’s gender, but their anxiety lay in their dissatisfaction with their own lot rather than a thoroughgoing and entirely serious indictment of the opposite sex.

Both Beatrice and Benedick are constrained by the roles they are forced to play. The woman and the man, the maiden and the officer, but they are unable to renounce the roles that they are relegated to. In fact, they are unable to publicly voice criticisms of their roles, so they turn their criticisms outward and attack one another.

In Branagh’s Much Ado, it is clear that their criticisms of the other are not deep seated. As far as outside observers are concerned, both Beatrice and Benedick have soured toward love, but this isn’t the case. Benedick is enthralled with the idea that despite his constant ravings about her sex, Beatrice is in love with him, so much so he ends up dancing in a fountain. For her part, Beatrice reacts the same way upon hearing that Benedick is in love with her. But their reactions after hearing that the other is in love with them show that this distaste for love isn’t at the heart of their problems. Beatrice and Benedick’s issues don’t have to do with falling in love or wanting to be in love with someone of the opposite sex. It is simply the public airing of their issues.

This contradiction becomes clear after the first Hero/Claudio wedding scene. Claudio believes that Hero has not lived up to her role as the chaste and dedicated young maiden, but rather than call off the wedding, he fulfills his role as a violent and vengeful man who acts on instinct rather than seeking reconciliation, a feminine trait.

Beatrice fulfills her feminine role in public. During the wedding scene, when Claudio attacks Hero, Beatrice supports her cousin. She literally holds Hero’s back while the tirade ensues. Branagh emphasizes the power that men hold over women in this society by positioning the men looming over the women, while the women are group together on the ground, fending off verbal as well as physical blows. In order to address criticisms of their gender roles, Beatrice and Benedick flee the public sphere. Beatrice retreats to a chapel near the wedding proceedings. Benedick follows. Roles are reversed. This private space acts as a confessional where Beatrice can critique her sex, or at very least the role women are relegated to in her society. She curses her inability to avenge her cousin. For his part, Benedick grapples with Beatrice’s demand that he play the male role and seek vengeance for Hero by murdering Claudio. Although revenge falls to the male role, Benedick cannot believe Claudio’s actions and seeks to repair relations between Claudio and Hero rather than merely killing him. Benedick seeks to reconcile Claudio with Hero. Reconciliation is depicted as a feminine trait. We finally see why Beatrice and Benedick have sworn off love. They are disinterested in fulfilling the gender roles that society has dictated for them. Their flip reactions to the wooing and ribaldry of their cohorts are a defense mechanism, something that distances them from the roles they are forced to play without causing a rupture from society, without being marginalized. But, when faced with the Claudio/Hero situation, Beatrice and Benedick are forced to carry out their assigned roles. Beatrice must remain silent, or voice her bloodthirsty anger in private. Benedick must fulfill the vengeful role in order to maintain Beatrice’s love and respect. Beatrice and Benedick maintain their roles and carry them into their relationship.

Branagh’s film is a damning indictment of relationships and how they are perceived and carried out in public. The adaptation condemns all relationships to the masculine/feminine binary. In the public sphere such role playing is endemic to heterosexual relationships. In private though, things are or often are entirely different.