Abstract
Sachon brings a phenomenological lens to bear on Yorick’s skull from Hamlet in order to explore the process of perception, and the strategies Shakespeare uses to shape our experience of objects in the embodied mind. She argues that Shakespeare’s creation of objects—real and imaginary—illuminates a distinct intentionality in his writing, designed to evoke powerful experiential immediacy for audience and reader. Sachon outlines and illustrates basic principles of phenomenology as founded by Edmund Husserl and discusses the value of Merleau-Ponty’s work on embodied perception. Using Ihde’s Experimental Phenomenology, she gives a step-by-step explication of her close-reading method, with examples from Shakespeare’s texts. Finally, she debates the strengths and potential limitations of phenomenological enquiry and considers the advantages of validating it within cross-disciplinary work.
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Sachon, S. (2020). Introduction: Shakespeare and Phenomenology. In: Shakespeare, Objects and Phenomenology. Palgrave Shakespeare Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-05207-2_1
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