“The written language of reality”: shakespearean adaptation and the cinematic sublime

Abstract

The main purpose of my thesis is to explore filmic adaptations and appropriations of Shakespeare’s plays in their interaction with contemporary cultural, social and political issues. The first chapter takes the hint from a theoretical background focused on the materialist implications of the philosophical realm of aesthetics, and the role the sublime plays in bringing them out. After retracing its origins as a rhetorical and philosophical notion intertwined with the history of aesthetics, I consider the sublime as an aesthetic category rooted in formal disorder and disproportion, which finds its concrete sources in the work’s overall disunity, incompleteness and fragmentation. As its etymological meaning of “height”, “peak”, “exaltation” suggests, the sublime in the aesthetic is still related to the ‘elevation’ of the mind, raising excitement and astonishment in the audience. Considering the “dismantling” function that the sublime has historically assumed in nature as in art, I analyse how such a notion is created within the artwork and operates in relation to material reality. In doing so, I consider how the sublime opens the work of art to an exchange with the actual context of both its production and reception, by which it ultimately elevates the mind of the receiver to the awareness of reality’s own conflicts and crises. … [edited by Author]