Shakespeare's two Venetian plays are dominated by the discourse of embarrassment. The Merchant of Venice is a comedy of embarrassment, and Othello is a tragedy of embarrassment. This nomenclature is admittedly anachronistic, because the term "embarrassment" didn't enter the language until the late seventeenth century.

To embarrass is to make someone feel awkward or uncomfortable, humiliated or ashamed. Such feelings may respond to specific acts of criticism, blame, or accusation. "To embarrass" is literally to "embar": to put up a barrier or deny access. The bar of...

With characteristic wit, Harry Berger, Jr., brings his flair for close reading to texts and images across two millennia that illustrate what he calls "structural misanthropology." Beginning with a novel reading of Plato, Berger emphasizes Socrates's self-acknowledged failures. The dialogues, he shows, offer up, only to dispute, a misanthropic polis. The Athenian city-state, they worry, is founded on a social order motivated by apprehension--both the desire to take and the fear of being taken. In addition to suggesting new political and philosophical dimensions to Platonic thought, Berger's...

In The Perils of Uglytown, Harry Berger, Jr., considers a variety of texts and images ranging from those of Thucydides and Plato to those of Shakespeare and Rembrandt.

The Introduction explains the key concept of the study, structural misanthropology, a variant on Claude Levi-Strauss's idea of structural anthropology. Part I explores its activity in several Platonic dialogues: Lysis, Crito, Phaedo, The Republic, and Timaeus.

Part II turns to the Renaissance in Italy, England, and the Netherlands. Structural misanthropology is discussed first in the work of several Italian humanists...

Harrying considers Richard III and the four plays of Shakespeare's Henriad--Richard II, Henry IV Part 1, Henry IV Part 2, and Henry V. Berger combines close reading with cultural analysis to show how the language characters speak always says more than the speakers mean to say. Shakespeare's speakers try to say one thing. Their language says other things that often question the speakers' motives or intentions. Harrying explores the effect of this linguistic mischief on the representation of all the Henriad's major figures. It centers attention on the portrayal of Falstaff and on the bad faith...

Figures of a Changing World offers a dramatic new account of cultural change, an account based on the distinction between two familiar rhetorical figures, metonymy and metaphor. The book treats metonymy as the basic organizing trope of traditional culture and metaphor as the basic organizing trope of modern culture. On the one hand, metonymies present themselves as analogies that articulate or reaffirm preexisting states of affairs. They are guarantors of facticity, a term that can be translated or defined as fact-like-ness. On the other hand, metaphors challenge the similarity they claim to...

Harrying considers Richard III and the four plays of Shakespeare's Henriad--Richard II, Henry IV Part 1, Henry IV Part 2, and Henry V. Berger combines close reading with cultural analysis to show how the language characters speak always says more than the speakers mean to say.

Shakespeare's speakers try to say one thing. Their language says other things that often question the speakers' motives or intentions. Harrying explores the effect of this linguistic mischief on the representation of all the Henriad's major figures.

It centers attention on the portrayal of Falstaff and...

Figures of a Changing World offers a dramatic new account of cultural change, an account based on the distinction between two familiar rhetorical figures, metonymy and metaphor. The book treats metonymy as the basic organizing trope of traditional culture and metaphor as the basic organizing trope of modern culture. On the one hand, metonymies present themselves as analogies that articulate or reaffirm preexisting states of affairs. They are guarantors of facticity, a term that can be translated or defined as fact-like-ness. On the other hand, metaphors challenge the similarity they...