A Jungian Study of Shakespeare: The Visionary Mode by Matthew A. Fike

By Matthew A. Fike

Using the analytical psychology of Carl Jung, Matthew A. Fike presents a clean realizing of individuation in Shakespeare. This research of “the visionary mode”— Jung’s time period for literature that comes throughout the artist from the collective unconscious—combines a robust grounding in Jungian terminology and conception with delusion feedback, biblical literary feedback, and postcolonial conception. Fike attracts generally at the wealthy discussions within the gathered Works of C. G. Jung to light up chosen performs akin to A Midsummer Night’s Dream, The service provider of Venice, The Henriad, Othello, and Hamlet in new and magnificent methods. Fike’s transparent and thorough method of Shakespeare deals intriguing, unique scholarship that may attract scholars and students alike.

Show description

Read or Download A Jungian Study of Shakespeare: The Visionary Mode PDF

Best shakespeare books

The Meaning of Shakespeare, Volume 1 (Phoenix Books)

In extraordinary and authoritative volumes, Harold C. Goddard takes readers on a journey during the works of William Shakespeare, celebrating his incomparable performs and unsurpassed literary genius.

Shakespearean genealogies of power: a whispering of nothing in Hamlet, Richard II, Julius Caesar, Macbeth, The merchant of Venice, and The winter's tale

Shakespearean Genealogies of energy proposes a brand new view on Shakespeare’s involvement with the criminal sphere: as a visual house among the spheres of politics and legislations and good capable of negotiate felony and political, even constitutional issues, Shakespeare’s theatre unfolded a brand new standpoint on normativity.

Marketing the Bard: Shakespeare in Performance and Print, 1660-1740

To posterity, William Shakespeare could be the Bard of Avon, yet to mid-seventeenth-century theatergoers he used to be simply one other dramatist. but slightly a century later, he used to be England’s preferred playwright and a loved ones identify. during this fascinating learn, Don-John Dugas explains how those alterations took place and sealed Shakespeare’s popularity even sooner than David Garrick played his paintings at the London level.

Shakespeare's Modern Collaborators

Fresh paintings in Shakespeare reports has delivered to the vanguard quite a few ways that the collaborative nature of Shakespearean drama should be investigated: collaborative functionality (Shakespeare and his fellow actors); collaborative writing (Shakespeare and his co-authors); collaborative textual creation (Shakespeare and his transcribers and printers).

Additional resources for A Jungian Study of Shakespeare: The Visionary Mode

Sample text

It might be more precise, however, to say not that the collective unconscious is timeless but that it transcends and includes all time—past, present, and future. Like other things in Jungian psychology, however, his theory of time is not without at least one contradiction. When he writes about future time in Synchronicity: An Acausal Connecting Principle, he argues that “it would be absurd to suppose that a situation which does not yet exist and will only occur in the future could transmit itself as a phenomenon of energy to a receiver in the present” (CW 8, 840/ 435).

One is a sort of imageor idea-making capacity; the other is an actual created image or idea in consciousness, visual art, or a literary text. In short, the collective unconscious sums up “the mental history of mankind” (CW 7, 108/68), and when it is put to artistic purposes (rather than being projected onto a therapist in the transference process), it enables what Jung calls the visionary mode of artistic creation. A further characteristic of the collective unconscious deserves development—its timeless nature.

Like Paul, one can access it while still alive with the help of the Holy Spirit,59 but imagination may enable something similar. To the extent that the archetypal is spiritual, what Jung calls the “active imagination”—a “switching off [of] consciousness, at least to a relative extent,” meaning presumably a switching off of reason (CW 11, 875/537)—enables transcendent experience. 60 Here Shakespeare seems out of step with such orthodox thinking as John Colet’s commentary on 1 Corinthians: “‘By no human resources, by no faculty of reason even in its highest vigour .

Download PDF sample

Rated 4.42 of 5 – based on 20 votes