Subha Mukherji - Profile on Academia.edu (original) (raw)

Papers by Subha Mukherji

Early Theatre, Jun 15, 2018

Probing the analogy between the conditions of performance and the structure of testamentary actio... more Probing the analogy between the conditions of performance and the structure of testamentary action, Gary Watt's book offers an original, minutely researched, and provocative thesis. Tracing 'testament' to its Latin etymology -suggesting the presence of a witness to the mind -Watt offers a new way of understanding the exchange between performers and audience that defines the theatrical event. What is more, he suggests that exchange leads to change -transformations of abiding social significance. In the process, Watt steers us into thinking about the affinity between law and theatre in a novel way: in terms of an expression of will that amounts to a social contract. While readers and viewers of Shakespeare's plays have affectively registered the notion of audience as witness for some time -often through meditations on the epilogues inviting audience judgement, approval or pardon, or on self-reflexive inset plays -Watt's work is the first to connect this notion with such sustained rigour to theatre's engagement of the imaginative work of law, and to the 'understood' nature of this relation in early modern English culture which made the intimacy and impact of this dialogue possible. Watt delves deep into the rhetoricity of the law, at the heart of what he calls the 'creative construct' (2) of English common law -at once expressing and moving wills. Watt establishes his thesis through readings of six Elizabethan plays -Richard II, King John, As You Like It, The Merchant of Venice, Julius Caesar, and Hamlet -though these plays are not his horizon. His reason for concentrating on Elizabethan Shakespeare is the belief that these plays focus Shakespeare's engagement with testament, using it as a plot-making device, a prop, and the basis of a semantic field. This notion is a premise that could bear further examination, as 'inheritance and succession' (3), concerns that Watt attributes to the Elizabethan works, seem to be quite as germane in, say, the emphatically Jacobean play, Macbeth, where will, witnessing, success, and succession are all hopelessly and tragically entangled, along with the language of execution. It is not insignificant that Watt uses the Jacobean Timon of Athens as his point of entry in the introductory first chapter -and rightly so. The way in which Timon connects a deferral of the performance of promissory words with imagining a future, signalled in Watt's

Facing Justice

The Oxford Handbook of Law and Humanities, 2019

Law and the literary imagination in early modern England had shared stakes in the relation betwee... more Law and the literary imagination in early modern England had shared stakes in the relation between face and intent, surface and significance, truth and semblance, nature and artifice. Using the legally attuned dramatist John Webster’s The White Devil as its central example, this chapter probes law’s preoccupation with legibility and the way in which drama enters into dialogue with it. In the process, law emerges an interface between an expressive mode and a hermeneutic model, and thus an imaginative resource for literary writers interested in selfhood and inwardness. Ultimately, the argument intimates how the gaps and dualities of the interrelation between the theatre and the law are used by early modern dramatic practice to conceptualize the larger interrelation between literary and legal epistemologies.

Invasion from Outer Space

Forms of Justice

In her last testament, Paradiso, the philosopher Gillian Rose asserts 'a refusal to adopt or ... more In her last testament, Paradiso, the philosopher Gillian Rose asserts 'a refusal to adopt or affirm the opposition between law and love which has so marred the development of Christian theology', and, by implication, Western thought about justice. It is in this courageous, revisionist tradition that Regina Schwartz's impassioned book Loving Justice, Living Shakespeare positions itself, and in turn locates Shakespeare's works, as it issues a clarion call for the integration of ethics and affect in creative as well as critical practice. But it is also an invitation to live a larger life, to operate in an economy of plenitude, not of scarcity, and to rethink the particulars of love in an age of suspicion and hardening insularity. Its agenda is unabashedly one of healing: healing a rupture between loving and judging, the personal and the political, textual and social practice, and between being critical and being human. And its central claim is that Shakespeare shows us ...

Knowing Games: A Response to Adam Zucker

Blind Spots of Knowledge in Shakespeare and His World, 2019

Thinking on Thresholds: Introduction

Law and Representation in Early Modern Drama: Appendix

Knowledge at the Crossroads

Trying, Knowing and Believing: Epistemic Plots and the Poetics of Doubt

Fictions of Knowledge, 2012

In Rabelais’s Tiers Livre, Panurge wants to marry but be certain that he will not be cuckolded, y... more In Rabelais’s Tiers Livre, Panurge wants to marry but be certain that he will not be cuckolded, yet the book shows how that can never be; how risk and choice must go hand in hand. It also shows, through his many attempts at interpreting divinations and dreams, how the desire for certainty infects our dealings with the world and distorts our reading of the ‘messages’ the world sends us: it is a matter of hermeneutics as well as ethics. Luckily for his world, Panurge does not try his own theories on other people. But doubting husbands in Renaissance English plays do. In seeking release from gnawing doubt, characters strive to reach what they think is a place of lucidity - a place, to borrow Elizabeth Bishop’s words, ‘like what you imagine knowledge to be: Dark, salt, clear, moving, utterly free’.2 But only too often, the knowledge arrived at proves to be rather different: dark, perhaps, moving, even, but far from clear, and less than free. An extreme instance is Hermione’s trial in Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale

‘Invasion from Outer Space’: The Threshold of Annunciations

Thinking on Thresholds

Jonson's The New Inn and a Revisiting of the 'Amorous Jurisdiction

Law and Literature, 2006

Abstract Three centuries before Auden’s conflation of law and love, Jonson’s The New Inn is re-re... more Abstract Three centuries before Auden’s conflation of law and love, Jonson’s The New Inn is re-read as a staging of the inescapable confrontation of rhetoric and legality, logic and emotion. Law as lived experience inflecting and inflected by real people, the immediacy of their emotions and passions, the inassimilable surplus that defeats discipline and disciplinary parameters; law as a function of human relationship—be it personal or communal is shown to be the subject matter and jurisdiction of the Courts of Love.

Dying and Living with de la Mare

On the last night of the blasted year just past, I suddenly woke up because I thought I heard a n... more On the last night of the blasted year just past, I suddenly woke up because I thought I heard a noise at the door: knock or whistle. I could not tell what hour it was. I stumbled downstairs to check my garden door and then my front door. Had I dreamt it? The whistle was a wild wind. The knock – it was someone, or something, I was sure, though my eyes just met darkness. But, like Bottom, and any audience in Shakespeare's theatre, I was hearing sights (and perhaps seeing sounds too). In fact I thought I knew, for a minute, that it was Ma – my mother, who had died on Christmas day in Kolkata, while I was stuck here in cold and dark Cambridge, desperately and ceaselessly trying to get home to India through successive flight cancellations and Covid chaos. I was desperate because place seemed to matter. But perhaps it doesn't to the dead. And it must not, to the living, when they want to hear-see the dead, and hear-say with them, against distance and spatial reality - a heresy bes...

Facing Justice: Evidence, Legibility and Pensiveness in the Early Modern Imagination

Law and the literary imagination in early modern England had shared stakes in the relation betwee... more Law and the literary imagination in early modern England had shared stakes in the relation between face and intent, surface and significance, truth and semblance, nature and artifice. Using the legally attuned dramatist John Webster’s The White Devil as its central example, this chapter probes law’s preoccupation with legibility and the way in which drama enters into dialogue with it. In the process, law emerges an interface between an expressive mode and a hermeneutic model, and thus an imaginative resource for literary writers interested in selfhood and inwardness. Ultimately, the argument intimates how the gaps and dualities of the interrelation between the theatre and the law are used by early modern dramatic practice to conceptualize the larger interrelation between literary and legal epistemologies.</p

Crossroads of Knowledge: Literature and Theology

Literature, Belief and Knowledge in Early Modern England

This chapter reflects on the ways in which imaginative literature probes, troubles, and illuminat... more This chapter reflects on the ways in which imaginative literature probes, troubles, and illuminates the relation between knowledge and faith through aesthetic mediation in post-Reformation England. In the process, it at once puts pressure on the category of the ‘literary’ and tunes us into the wider cultural meanings of ‘faith’, showing how an alternative episteme is forged in the synergies between religious belief and literary art. It posits, and offers for critical thinking, a poetics of faith at the intersection of form, feeling, and doctrine, one that turns apparent challenges of religious cognition into imaginatively, ethically, and emotionally productive resources. The chapter places this approach methodologically in the context of The Crossroads of Knowledge project out of which this volume emerges. Finally, it indicates how the individual chapters in this book speak to each other and weave a hermeneutic discourse that brings to life the experiential dimension of knowledge in the devotional domain, and traces the imaginative texture of faith and its ways of knowing, unknowing, and half-knowing.

The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this p... more The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use.

False Trials and the Impulse to Try in Shakespeare and his Contemporaries

Early Theatre, Jun 15, 2018

Probing the analogy between the conditions of performance and the structure of testamentary actio... more Probing the analogy between the conditions of performance and the structure of testamentary action, Gary Watt's book offers an original, minutely researched, and provocative thesis. Tracing 'testament' to its Latin etymology -suggesting the presence of a witness to the mind -Watt offers a new way of understanding the exchange between performers and audience that defines the theatrical event. What is more, he suggests that exchange leads to change -transformations of abiding social significance. In the process, Watt steers us into thinking about the affinity between law and theatre in a novel way: in terms of an expression of will that amounts to a social contract. While readers and viewers of Shakespeare's plays have affectively registered the notion of audience as witness for some time -often through meditations on the epilogues inviting audience judgement, approval or pardon, or on self-reflexive inset plays -Watt's work is the first to connect this notion with such sustained rigour to theatre's engagement of the imaginative work of law, and to the 'understood' nature of this relation in early modern English culture which made the intimacy and impact of this dialogue possible. Watt delves deep into the rhetoricity of the law, at the heart of what he calls the 'creative construct' (2) of English common law -at once expressing and moving wills. Watt establishes his thesis through readings of six Elizabethan plays -Richard II, King John, As You Like It, The Merchant of Venice, Julius Caesar, and Hamlet -though these plays are not his horizon. His reason for concentrating on Elizabethan Shakespeare is the belief that these plays focus Shakespeare's engagement with testament, using it as a plot-making device, a prop, and the basis of a semantic field. This notion is a premise that could bear further examination, as 'inheritance and succession' (3), concerns that Watt attributes to the Elizabethan works, seem to be quite as germane in, say, the emphatically Jacobean play, Macbeth, where will, witnessing, success, and succession are all hopelessly and tragically entangled, along with the language of execution. It is not insignificant that Watt uses the Jacobean Timon of Athens as his point of entry in the introductory first chapter -and rightly so. The way in which Timon connects a deferral of the performance of promissory words with imagining a future, signalled in Watt's

Facing Justice

The Oxford Handbook of Law and Humanities, 2019

Law and the literary imagination in early modern England had shared stakes in the relation betwee... more Law and the literary imagination in early modern England had shared stakes in the relation between face and intent, surface and significance, truth and semblance, nature and artifice. Using the legally attuned dramatist John Webster’s The White Devil as its central example, this chapter probes law’s preoccupation with legibility and the way in which drama enters into dialogue with it. In the process, law emerges an interface between an expressive mode and a hermeneutic model, and thus an imaginative resource for literary writers interested in selfhood and inwardness. Ultimately, the argument intimates how the gaps and dualities of the interrelation between the theatre and the law are used by early modern dramatic practice to conceptualize the larger interrelation between literary and legal epistemologies.

Invasion from Outer Space

Forms of Justice

In her last testament, Paradiso, the philosopher Gillian Rose asserts 'a refusal to adopt or ... more In her last testament, Paradiso, the philosopher Gillian Rose asserts 'a refusal to adopt or affirm the opposition between law and love which has so marred the development of Christian theology', and, by implication, Western thought about justice. It is in this courageous, revisionist tradition that Regina Schwartz's impassioned book Loving Justice, Living Shakespeare positions itself, and in turn locates Shakespeare's works, as it issues a clarion call for the integration of ethics and affect in creative as well as critical practice. But it is also an invitation to live a larger life, to operate in an economy of plenitude, not of scarcity, and to rethink the particulars of love in an age of suspicion and hardening insularity. Its agenda is unabashedly one of healing: healing a rupture between loving and judging, the personal and the political, textual and social practice, and between being critical and being human. And its central claim is that Shakespeare shows us ...

Knowing Games: A Response to Adam Zucker

Blind Spots of Knowledge in Shakespeare and His World, 2019

Thinking on Thresholds: Introduction

Law and Representation in Early Modern Drama: Appendix

Knowledge at the Crossroads

Trying, Knowing and Believing: Epistemic Plots and the Poetics of Doubt

Fictions of Knowledge, 2012

In Rabelais’s Tiers Livre, Panurge wants to marry but be certain that he will not be cuckolded, y... more In Rabelais’s Tiers Livre, Panurge wants to marry but be certain that he will not be cuckolded, yet the book shows how that can never be; how risk and choice must go hand in hand. It also shows, through his many attempts at interpreting divinations and dreams, how the desire for certainty infects our dealings with the world and distorts our reading of the ‘messages’ the world sends us: it is a matter of hermeneutics as well as ethics. Luckily for his world, Panurge does not try his own theories on other people. But doubting husbands in Renaissance English plays do. In seeking release from gnawing doubt, characters strive to reach what they think is a place of lucidity - a place, to borrow Elizabeth Bishop’s words, ‘like what you imagine knowledge to be: Dark, salt, clear, moving, utterly free’.2 But only too often, the knowledge arrived at proves to be rather different: dark, perhaps, moving, even, but far from clear, and less than free. An extreme instance is Hermione’s trial in Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale

‘Invasion from Outer Space’: The Threshold of Annunciations

Thinking on Thresholds

Jonson's The New Inn and a Revisiting of the 'Amorous Jurisdiction

Law and Literature, 2006

Abstract Three centuries before Auden’s conflation of law and love, Jonson’s The New Inn is re-re... more Abstract Three centuries before Auden’s conflation of law and love, Jonson’s The New Inn is re-read as a staging of the inescapable confrontation of rhetoric and legality, logic and emotion. Law as lived experience inflecting and inflected by real people, the immediacy of their emotions and passions, the inassimilable surplus that defeats discipline and disciplinary parameters; law as a function of human relationship—be it personal or communal is shown to be the subject matter and jurisdiction of the Courts of Love.

Dying and Living with de la Mare

On the last night of the blasted year just past, I suddenly woke up because I thought I heard a n... more On the last night of the blasted year just past, I suddenly woke up because I thought I heard a noise at the door: knock or whistle. I could not tell what hour it was. I stumbled downstairs to check my garden door and then my front door. Had I dreamt it? The whistle was a wild wind. The knock – it was someone, or something, I was sure, though my eyes just met darkness. But, like Bottom, and any audience in Shakespeare's theatre, I was hearing sights (and perhaps seeing sounds too). In fact I thought I knew, for a minute, that it was Ma – my mother, who had died on Christmas day in Kolkata, while I was stuck here in cold and dark Cambridge, desperately and ceaselessly trying to get home to India through successive flight cancellations and Covid chaos. I was desperate because place seemed to matter. But perhaps it doesn't to the dead. And it must not, to the living, when they want to hear-see the dead, and hear-say with them, against distance and spatial reality - a heresy bes...

Facing Justice: Evidence, Legibility and Pensiveness in the Early Modern Imagination

Law and the literary imagination in early modern England had shared stakes in the relation betwee... more Law and the literary imagination in early modern England had shared stakes in the relation between face and intent, surface and significance, truth and semblance, nature and artifice. Using the legally attuned dramatist John Webster’s The White Devil as its central example, this chapter probes law’s preoccupation with legibility and the way in which drama enters into dialogue with it. In the process, law emerges an interface between an expressive mode and a hermeneutic model, and thus an imaginative resource for literary writers interested in selfhood and inwardness. Ultimately, the argument intimates how the gaps and dualities of the interrelation between the theatre and the law are used by early modern dramatic practice to conceptualize the larger interrelation between literary and legal epistemologies.</p

Crossroads of Knowledge: Literature and Theology

Literature, Belief and Knowledge in Early Modern England

This chapter reflects on the ways in which imaginative literature probes, troubles, and illuminat... more This chapter reflects on the ways in which imaginative literature probes, troubles, and illuminates the relation between knowledge and faith through aesthetic mediation in post-Reformation England. In the process, it at once puts pressure on the category of the ‘literary’ and tunes us into the wider cultural meanings of ‘faith’, showing how an alternative episteme is forged in the synergies between religious belief and literary art. It posits, and offers for critical thinking, a poetics of faith at the intersection of form, feeling, and doctrine, one that turns apparent challenges of religious cognition into imaginatively, ethically, and emotionally productive resources. The chapter places this approach methodologically in the context of The Crossroads of Knowledge project out of which this volume emerges. Finally, it indicates how the individual chapters in this book speak to each other and weave a hermeneutic discourse that brings to life the experiential dimension of knowledge in the devotional domain, and traces the imaginative texture of faith and its ways of knowing, unknowing, and half-knowing.

The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this p... more The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use.

False Trials and the Impulse to Try in Shakespeare and his Contemporaries

Literature, Belief, and Knowledge in Early Modern England: Knowing Faith (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018)

The primary aim of Knowing Faith is to uncover the intervention of literary texts and approaches ... more The primary aim of Knowing Faith is to uncover the intervention of literary texts and approaches in a wider conversation about religious knowledge: why we need it, how to get there, where to stop, and how to recognise it once it has been attained. Its relative freedom from specialised disciplinary investments allows a literary lens to bring into focus the relatively elusive strands of thinking about belief, knowledge and salvation, probing the particulars of affect implicit in the generalities of doctrine. The essays in this volume collectively probe the dynamic between literary form, religious faith and the process, psychology and ethics of knowing in early modern England. Addressing both the poetics of theological texts and literary treatments of theological matter, they stretch from the Reformation to the early Enlightenment, and cover a variety of themes ranging across religious hermeneutics, rhetoric and controversy, the role of the senses, and the entanglement of justice, ethics and practical theology.

The book should appeal to scholars of early modern literature and culture, theologians and historians of religion, and general readers with a broad interest in Renaissance cultures of knowing.

law and representation in early modern england

Chapter 1, Literature, Belief and Knowledge in early Modern England: Knowing Faith, ed by Subha Mukherji and Tm Stuart-Buttle (forthcoming, Palgrave Macmillan: 2018), 2018

Comparative Drama, Volume 57, Number 3, Winter 2023, pp. 299-303 (Article), 2023