CAHIERS ELISABETHAINS最新文献_第9页

Book Review: Shakespeare and Crisis: One Hundred Years of Italian Narratives by Silvia Bigliazzi 书评:莎士比亚与危机:西尔维娅·比格里亚齐的《百年意大利叙事》

IF 0.5 2区文学

CAHIERS ELISABETHAINS Pub Date : 2021-11-01 DOI: 10.1177/01847678211039874f

J. Valls-Russell

{"title":"Book Review: Shakespeare and Crisis: One Hundred Years of Italian Narratives by Silvia Bigliazzi","authors":"J. Valls-Russell","doi":"10.1177/01847678211039874f","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/01847678211039874f","url":null,"abstract":"How does one define ‘crisis’, that convenient holdall, bandied by – you name them – parents griping about their teenagers, but also politicians, journalists, economists, sociologists, art critics, psychologists, and Shakespeareans? Whether in the singular or the plural, with or without qualifiers, ‘crisis’ is a convenient tag for a wide range of individual and collective experiences. In her afterword to Shakespeare and Crisis: One Hundred Years of Italian Narratives, Silvia Bigliazzi, editor and principal contributor of this intellectually compelling volume, warns that ‘[i]deas of “permanent crisis” as a succession or concomitance of different undifferentiated destabilising factors have long prompted overuse of the word, making the pathology almost undiagnosable’ (p. 279). Also, how long does a crisis last? Does a situation that becomes endemic still qualify as a crisis, or does it become another form of normality – in a given historical, geographical and cultural context? This would suggest a degree of relativity: what may seem exceptional in one place and time may be, or become, the norm elsewhere. Certainly, the current pandemic and its consequences illustrate how a global threat is reconfigured by national, regional, social and individual factors that produce multiple intersecting responses to what one can confidently consider is a global crisis. Within Europe, Italy seems an appropriate hunting-ground to try and track down the notion of crisis within a turbulent national context that combines creative resilience with what Bigliazzi describes as a ‘diffuse longterm sense of crisis’ (p. 279). Engagement with Shakespeare provides a compelling narrative thread. Framed by an introduction and afterword, this collection of seven essays spans a century book-ended by two centennial celebrations of Shakespeare’s birth, 1916 and 2016. In her introduction, Bigliazzi sets out a transdisciplinary toolbox. She recalls the three basic models of crisis defined by Reinhart Koselleck, that may be identified individually and collectively, in a variety of combinations: permanent, or systemic crisis; iterative crisis, which can produce progress; and crisis as final decision, identifying ‘an absolute turning point’ (p. 7). All three models have become familiar over the past century in a country like Italy, inspiring intellectual and artistic responses. Bigliazzi draws attention to the disjunctive, destabilising nature of crisis:","PeriodicalId":42648,"journal":{"name":"CAHIERS ELISABETHAINS","volume":"22 1","pages":"128 - 131"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2021-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"65227631","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}