The Fragmentation of the Proper Name and the Crisis of Degree: v. 13

This is a rich interpretation of a rich text. Ben Amara provides a twenty-first century reading of a timeless masterpiece, and in so doing he can point to the relationship of death and desire as playing both with body and language. He delights in confronting his readers with the ineluctable patterns which language and time inscribe within the open/closed Shakespearean space: Degree, division, and diversity as the focal points. Emphasis upon the corporeality of the human body concatenates this study's textual interpretation with the corpus of the literary canon, itself seen as a body divided by performance and differed by reading. It is also true that [this] prevails over the damaging engagement with the deconstructed text and dominates the conflictual tendencies of the reconstructed drama."--Christopher Mulvery, King Alfred's College, Wincester, England Radhouan Ben Amara has a Ph.D. in comparative literature from Washington University in the United States. He is professor of French at the University of Cagliari in Italy and also teaches English and English literature at Martini's High Institute in Cagliari.