The Paramaterial Phantasy
Part I. “He thinks tis but our fantasy”: The Ontology and Epistemology of Ghosts and Spirits In William Shakespeare’s Hamlet, the skeptical and possibly Stoic Horatio reveals to the melancholic eponymous prince that he has seen a phantasm. Before Horatio can even reveal his harrowing yet problematic tale of seeing a “form like [Hamlet’s] father,” […]
In Petrarch’s Secretum written somewhere between 1347 and 1353 and circulated posthumously, Petrarch shapes a dialogue between himself and a fictionalized Augustine. Augustine chastises and instructs Petrarch for favoring an attention to the world over devotion to God and spiritual things. Towards the end of book one of this dialogue, Augustine reveals the tensions inherent […]
My last post sketched out how the paramaterial mind emerges towards the end of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. I will have more to say about deceiving the external and internal senses in that play in a later post, but I first want to focus on a much shorter and less complex poem to develop […]
portion of my last post’s title comes from the fifth act of William Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream where Hippolyta and Theseus discuss the strange alterations of love they have just witnessed in the forest. Hippolyta declares the speeches delivered by the lovers as “strange,” prompting The Duke’s declaration of the vulnerability […]