Schedule / Horaire
Tuesday 22 April 2014, 15h30-17h30.
Room: V115/V116.
Leaders / Organisateurs
Jonathan Hart, University of Alberta (Canada) Seda Çağlayan Mazanoğlu, Hacettepe University (Turkey), and Merve Sarı Hacettepe University (Turkey)
Participants
- Lazarenko Darya, Zaporizhzhia National University (Ukraine)
“To thine ownself be true”: dealing with opacity and solving riddles in the Ukrainian translations of Hamlet - Preeti Gautam, M.J.P. Rohilkhand University Bareilly (India)
Airy Nothing or Else? Negotiating A Midsummer Night’s Dream in terms of generic categorization - Özlem Aydin Öztürk, Bülent Ecevit University (Turkey)
“Like, or find fault, do as your pleasures are”: The Mock-Heroic in Troilus and Cressida - Swati Ganguly, Visva-Bharati (India)
The problematic of representing Cleopatra: the aesthetics of grotesque - Merve Sarı, Hacettepe University (Turkey)
The Subversive Power of the Fantastic as a Mode in The Tempest - Lori Lee Wallace, Pacific Lutheran University (USA)
A problematic relationship in a problem play: why All’s Well that Ends Well is one of the least performed plays of the Shakespearean canon - Kübra Vural, Hacettepe University (Turkey)
The Problems of the Female Wor(l)d in Troilus and Cressida - Agnieszka Szwach, Jan Kochanowski University, Kielce (Poland)
All’s Well, That Ends Well: A Problem Play Or A Problematic Heroine? - Jennifer Edwards, Royal Holloway, University of London (UK)
‘Bifold authority’: Shakespeare’s Problem Children - Miguel Ramalhete Gomes, University of Porto (Portugal)
The problem of cynicism in Measure for Measure - Natalia A. Shatalova, Lomonossov Moscow State University (Russia)
A ‘problem play’: interplay of genre and method - Emine Seda Çağlayan Mazanoğlu, Hacettepe University (Turkey)
A Problematic Play: Questions, Ambiguity and Human Nature in King Lear
Abstracts / Résumés
1. Lazarenko Darya, Zaporizhzhia National University (Ukraine)
“To thine ownself be true”: dealing with opacity and solving riddles in the Ukrainian translations of Hamlet
The history of the Ukrainian Hamlet shows that the tragedy’s thought-provoking cognitive resources have always been efficiently employed as a means of intellectual campaigning. Today Hamlet keeps attracting the most gifted and charismatic translators who attempt to decipher the messages encoded in this masterpiece. The result differs each time depending on the aim and epistemological priorities of the translator. Sometimes new riddles are created. Singling out those special ambiguous moments may show us how the opacity of Shakespeare’s twilight can be deliberately turned either into a bright day, or a dark night.
2. Preeti Gautam, M.J.P. Rohilkhand University Bareilly (India)
Airy Nothing or Else? Negotiating A Midsummer Night’s Dream in terms of generic categorization
The debate dismantling the traditional categorization of attributing distinct categories to Shakespeare’s plays has taken into its ambit even his ‘pure romances’. The research paper makes an attempt to underscore the grey areas subsisting along the apparent happy content of the play, dismissed generally as ‘ airy nothing’,’ unaccountable to social or political realism’ etc. The paper argues that beneath the festivity lurches the unrest and despair brewing up in the society of Shakespeare’s time. Gender tensions heralding the beginning of a cultural redefinition of female youth, the debate about folk and courtly theatre, awareness about class suggest play’s open-endedness.
3. Özlem Aydin Öztürk, Bülent Ecevit University (Turkey)
“Like, or find fault, do as your pleasures are”: The Mock-Heroic in Troilus and Cressida
Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida is classified as one of his problem plays due to its blend of comedy and tragic material. Set in the Trojan war, the play makes use of the heroic legend and love story of Troilus and Cressida to present a problematic world. This paper focuses on Shakespeare’s presentation of the mock-heroic by undermining set rules of courtly love tradition and heroism to point to the fact that these idealised concepts are only romantic ideals in total contrast to real life. In that sense, the play is neither a comedy nor tragedy as real life rarely is.
4. Swati Ganguly, Visva-Bharati (India)
The problematic of representing Cleopatra: the aesthetics of grotesque
At the heart of Antony and Cleopatra (1608), is the figure of Cleopatra. She elicits a simultaneous fascination and revulsion because the play draws attention to the process of her representation as an amalgam, a yoking together disparate elements. This unsettles the response of readers and audience. I would like to explore the strategies through which this occurs and suggest that she is meant to be a fantastic hybrid creature that aesthetic discourses identify as grotesque. This I argue can be understood as the Orientalist fantasy of Egypt as space of carnivalesque excess.
5. Merve Sarı, Hacettepe University (Turkey)
The Subversive Power of the Fantastic as a Mode in The Tempest
William Shakespeare’s The Tempest relies on the supernatural and the carnivalesque in order to temporarily suspend the rules that regulate the society. Questioning power and authority, and the issue of self and the other, the play brings several contrasts like illusion and reality, id and superego, civilisation and barbarism together so as to establish new discourses against the socially dominant ones. Thus, enabling the previously marginalised to be decentred, The Tempest is subversive in terms of the questions it raises against the socially dominant discourses, subsequently marking the play as a problem play.
6. Lori Lee Wallace, Pacific Lutheran University (USA)
A problematic relationship in a problem play: why All’s Well that Ends Well is one of the least performed plays of the Shakespearean canon
All’s Well that Ends Well is considered to be one of Shakespeare’s “problem plays”. In this paper I shall suggest that the problematic nature of the play is due to the unease that audiences feel at the nature of the central love story and specifically link this unease to the “quasi-incestuous” make up of Bertram and Helena’s relationship. Furthermore, I will demonstrate that the indifferent reception that the play receives is due the female protagonist being an active pursuer of a male and the basis of this chase is not the usual motivation of romantic love, rather sexual anxiety.
7. Kübra Vural, Hacettepe University (Turkey)
The Problems of the Female Wor(l)d in Troilus and Cressida
Troilus and Cressida’s masculine atmosphere leaves no space for women to act and speak at the time of the Trojan War. In this patriarchal world, Cressida is forced to obey the orders of the male figures which ends with the separation of the lovers. Her compulsory going to the Greek camp seems to drive her into oblivion. Although Cressida lacks a voice of her own to express her actual feelings, her misogynistic representation portraits an unfaithful female figure. This paper aims to demonstrate the problems of female world in terms of representation and language of Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida.
8. Agnieszka Szwach, Jan Kochanowski University, Kielce (Poland)
All’s Well, That Ends Well: A Problem Play Or A Problematic Heroine?
To a number of modern critics, especially since the rise of socially oriented drama, a ‘problem play’ connotes rather a play ‘about’ problems than a play ‘with’ problems. In All’s Well, with its striking focus on sexual and gender politics, problems are linked to Helena a determined woman undeterred to take on a challenge in a patriarchal world. Therefore, this paper makes an attempt to analyse Helena’s relationships with the main male characters of the play and to examine to what extent those relationships reflect or even question social, political and cultural order of the Elizabethan and Jacobean period.
9. Jennifer Edwards, Royal Holloway, University of London (UK)
‘Bifold authority’: Shakespeare’s Problem Children
For F.S. Boas the term ‘problem plays’ reflected the ways in which Troilus and Cressida, All’s Well That Ends Well and Measure for Measure dramatize intractable moral problems. A century on from Boas, however, the term has shifted its meaning to accommodate the view advanced by Tillyard that the plays themselves are problems in the same way that some children are ‘problem’ children. Pushing this analogy further, this paper contends that it is not only the textual children who are problematic, but also the critical parents, who fail to recognise the ‘bifold authority’ that governs Shakespeare’s works.
10. Miguel Ramalhete Gomes, University of Porto (Portugal)
The problem of cynicism in Measure for Measure
This paper proposes to identify the social dissemination of cynicism as one of the central problems of Measure for Measure. Resorting to Peter Sloterdijk’s definition of cynical reason as “enlightened false consciousness”, I will consider the pervasive cynicism in the play as an uncomfortable manifestation of the conflict between appearance and reality and of the resulting negotiation of knowledge. This conflict will be said to take the social form of a Vienna peopled with cunning rulers and knowing subjects who only seem capable of reacting to measures they do not believe in by resorting to ruses.
11. Natalia A. Shatalova, Lomonossov Moscow State University (Russia)
A ‘problem play’: interplay of genre and method
Shakespeare’s method in so-called problem plays is often said to defy their grouping, and genre-crossing elements can be found elsewhere across Shakespearean canon. The present paper argues that two plays – Troilus and Cressida and Measure for Measure — have deep-lying affinity with the truly problem plays of the 19th-20th centuries. They are heavily charged ideologically, while partially blocking emotional involvement of the audience. The term “problem play” may be also applied to Antony and Cleopatra, but with a different meaning, thus stressing the importance of receptive aspects of the analysis.
12. Emine Seda Çağlayan Mazanoğlu, Hacettepe University (Turkey)
A Problematic Play: Questions, Ambiguity and Human Nature in King Lear
Though King Lear isn’t categorised as problem play, it has a serious mood, hence has various features of problem play. The aim of this paper is to analyse King Lear in terms of problematic social, political, moral and familial questions it raises and leaves to the audience interpretation. Moreover, the generic ambiguity will be analysed as though the play is a tragedy, it has comic and absurd elements. The analogies with the historical background of the 16th and 17th centuries will be demonstrated while the exploration of human nature will be also dealt with.