Acknowledgements -- Introduction -- 1 The Unphenomenal  “This Nothing’s More than Matter” -- 2 The Spectre of the Cartesian Subject -- 3 Misrepresentations  Shakespeare and the Phenomenologists -- 4 What Phenomenology? Kant to Levinas -- 5 Spontaneous Me -- 6 The Harm That Good Men and Women Do -- 7 Affective styles -- 8 A Pastoral Philosophy -- 9 What Matters in Shakespeare? -- 10 Undialing the Dialectic -- 11 The Maladies of Abstinence  No More Cakes and Ale -- 12 The Naturalization of Reason  Who Is Afraid of Ferdinand Derrida? -- 13 Doing Shakespeare  To the Things Themselves -- 14 Reading Shakespeare  Is There a Text in This Play? -- 15 If Caliban Is a Chimpanzee and Other Posthumanist Conditions -- 16 The Aesthetic Ideology -- 17 The Aesthetic Fallacy -- 18 The Fallacy of Representation -- 19 The Fallacy of Immediacy -- 20 The Fallacy of Presentism -- Bibliographical References -- Index.

In the aftermath of New Historicism and Cultural Materialism, the field of Shakespeare Studies has been increasingly overrun by post-theoretical, phenomenological claims. Many of the critical tendencies that hold the field today—post-humanism, speculative realism, ecocriticism, historical phenomenology, new materialism, performance studies, animal studies, affect studies—are consciously or unwittingly informed by phenomenological assumptions. This book aims at uncovering and examining these claims, not only to assess their philosophical congruency but also to determine their hermeneutic relevance when applied to Shakespeare. More specifically, Unphenomenal Shakespeare deploys resources of speculative critique to resist the moralistic and aestheticist phenomenalization of the Shakespeare playtexts across a variety of schools and scholars, a tendency best epitomized in Bruce Smith’s Phenomenal Shakespeare (2010).

English

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