"I Will Tell It Softly":

مرکز و کتابخانه مطالعات اسلامی به زبان های اروپایی

منو

" "I Will Tell It Softly": "
Giordano, Kailey

Document Type	:	AL
Record Number	:	916856
Doc. No	:	LA1v679962
Title & Author	:	"I Will Tell It Softly":. Facing the Limits of Epistemological Certainty Through Touch in The Winter's Tale [Article]\ Giordano, Kailey
Date	:	2014
Title of Periodical	:	UCLA
Abstract	:	While studies on the subject of epistemology in Shakespeare’s plays have long centered on the tragedies or surveyed the romances and late plays as a collective group, few pieces turn to the problems of epistemology in The Winter’s Tale alone. Among those who have undertaken such a study, many simply touch on the limits of knowledge in this play and in turn pass over the manifold comic-restorative ways in which this play helps us come to terms with these barriers. In The Winter’s Tale, Shakespeare enters a dialogue that has been overlooked since the Renaissance and only recently been revived in twentieth-century biological studies, one that thrusts the tactile sense to the forefront of the ways by which we come to interact with others and manage the anxiety that stems from our inability to entirely know them. In this thesis, I revive such a conversation by proposing that touch is able to confront the philosophical “problem of other minds” in ways that the other senses cannot in the play by immersing us into the tangible world and reaching out to less tangible realms at once: the emotions, the social field, and narrative production. By revealing how formative touch is to the processes by which we seek to understand and relate to the minds of others, I illuminate how the play circulates and helps to resolve the epistemological concerns of early seventeenth-century England that still resonate today.