Scattered Corn: Ritual Violence and the Death of Rome in Titus Andronicus | Scattered Corn: Ritual Violence and the Death of Rome in Titus Andronicus
Scattered Corn: Ritual Violence and the Death of Rome in Titus Andronicus
Naomi Conn Liebler, Montclair State University
[We] never really confront a text immediately, in all its freshness as a thing-in-itself. Rather, texts come before us as the always-already-read; we apprehend them through sedimented layers of previous interpretations, or … through the sedimented reading habits and categories developed by those inherited interpretive traditions. Fredric Jameson, Preface, The Political Unconscious
"Tragedy conjures the extinction of the human race" (Woodbridge 1994: 179). The ominous loading of the stage at the ends of Shakespearean tragedies encourages the view that tragedy is about death: the death of the body, of the spirit, of the polity. In that sense, Titus Andronicus (which rivals Hamlet in its final on-stage body count) should be judged one of Shakespeare's most...
[The entire page is 9570 words long]
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