Shakespeare and Impure Aesthetics

Abstract

Shakespeare and Impure Aesthetics explores ideas about art implicit in Shakespeare's plays and defines specific Shakespearean aesthetic practices in his use of desire, death and mourning as resources for art. Hugh Grady draws on a tradition of aesthetic theorists who understand art as always formed in a specific historical moment but as also distanced from its context through its form and Utopian projections. Grady sees A Midsummer Night's Dream, Timon of Athens, Hamlet, and Romeo and Juliet as displaying these qualities, showing aesthetic theory's usefulness for close readings of the plays. The book argues that such social-minded 'impure aesthetics' can revitalize the political impulses of the new historicism while opening up a new aesthetic dimension in the current discussion of Shakespeare.

Baroque Trauerspiel in William Shakespeare’s Hamlet: A Rejection of Aristotelian Tragedy

“…This sense toward death among other things as the ghost's free movement we see in the first scene of the first act that disturbs the Jetztzeit, the relation between chronological time with action, "embodies Hamlet's sense of the lost world of immanent meaning[s]" (Grady, 2009 Hamlet aligns with the play trying to disengage "from what had been, before the death of his father, a meaningful, epic, immanent world" which is the features of the mythical world and a step forward to the real world in which time and action are two completely separate things (Grady, 2009, p.160-1). Then, the world that Hamlet describes, what Benjamin means real world, indeed, is nothing just the post-fall world.…”

“…Then, the world that Hamlet describes, what Benjamin means real world, indeed, is nothing just the post-fall world. As it has been said before Man after the Sin was expelled from Eden and exiled to this world, the profane world, the world in which "both [Man's] words and actions" (Grady, 2009, p.164) cannot bring back the thing which is lost.…”

“…Such " [profane] world … [after The Fall] is an alien collection of objects seeking meaning and significance," (Grady, 2009, p.155) however, after The Fall, human language in contrast to the paradise language loses "the natural correlation between word and thing" (Grady, 2009, p. 144). This is a "cut off from higher meaning" (Grady, 2009, p Hamlet more than plays with Polonius, as a namer tries to find a name for the cloud which is in motion.…”

Reflexive Dwelling:

“…And although the difference between these two realms is clear, the barrier between them, like wall in the inset play, has chinks in it, and within each separate domain there are traces of its excluded other. 14 Therefore, the Mechanicals' play is reflexive of both the content within the play while also holding a mirror to broader social IDEA JOURNAL 2013 Unbecoming IDEA JOURNAL 2013 Unbecoming and political issues of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century.…”

1.1.0 Is MBSE a Tectonic Shift in the Way We Perform Systems Engineering?

“…Grady has written about modeling and a Unified Architectural Description Framework (UADF) [Grady 2009]. Grady is generally method-and notation-agnostic.…”