Shakespeare, Bakhtin, and Film

This book explores how Bakhtins ideas can illuminate the compelling but uneasy fusion of Shakespeare and cinema. With a wide variety of tones, languages, cultural orientations, and thematic concerns, film directors have updated, translated, transposed, fragmented, parodied, and geographically re-situated Shakespeare. Keith Harrison illustrates how Bakhtins interlinked writings in various fields can fruitfully be applied to an understanding of how the ongoing responsiveness of filmmakers to Shakespeares historically remote words can shape self-expressive acts of co-authoring in another medium. Through the use of such Bakhtinian concepts as the chronotope, heteroglossia, the carnivalesque, and polyphony, Harrison details how filmmakersfaithful to their specific cultures, genders, geographies, and historical momentsdialogically locate their particularity through Shakespeares presence.