Reading Shakespeare Reading Me by Leonard Barkan - 9780823299195

Reading Shakespeare Reading MeAuthor(s): Leonard Barkan\nFormat: Hardback\nPublisher: Fordham University Press, United States\nImprint: Fordham University Press\nISBN-13: 9780823299195, 978-0823299195\nSynopsis\nA gripping, funny, joyful account of how the books you read shape your own life in surprising and profound ways.\n Bookworms know what scholars of literature are trained to forget: that when they devour a work of literary fiction, whatever else they may be doing, they are reading about themselves. Read Shakespeare, and you become Cleopatra, Hamlet, or Bottom. Or at the very least, you experience the plays as if you are in a small room alone with them, and they are speaking to your life, your sensibility.\n Drawing on fifty years as a Shakespearean, Leonard Barkan has produced a captivating book that asks us to reconsider what it means to read. Barkan violates the rule of distance he was taught and has always taught his students. He asks: Where does this brilliantly contrived .