VygotskyOSU

To Vygotsky, to be or not to be, that is a unified question. My prior knowledge about Hamlet is very limited to a required reading in high school and a free ticket to the play performed by the best theatre group. I never understand why it's a great-of-all-time work. I own to the fact that I never spend time to try to understand the play and I am poor at literacy... One thing I'm sure is that I never experience emotional awareness from it. This was true until reading Vygotsky's chapter, The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark. I guess I am shallow at first when reading something new. I need to see the relevance or need to make sense first at the plot level. Obviously, I failed. I never see a person like Hamlet. To me, Hamlet is neither a character that exaggerates one characteristics of a real person nor a character based on a sophisticated real person. He is not even consistent. His immediate action of killing the person behind the curtain and his procrastination of...

It is a seed for me to read the original edition of Hamlet later, though it is awkward to confess that my life experience resulted in the gap between my understanding of the object - the work Hamlet - itself, and the meaning of the tragedy. From the chapter, we can know that plenty of previous literary critics traditionally interpreted the behaviors of Hamlet based on life-experiences and human nature. However, Vygotsky tried to analyze it from the play itself, such as the process of the author's creation, the structure of tragedy (elements of contradiction), and its re-creation in staging. I would not agree with the research that trying to draw psychological conclusions from imaginary characters is scientific. Any analysis cannot escape the condition that being restricted by one's experiences. What's the difference between interpreting empirical evidences and artistic works? What's the point of analyzing them? Is there a commonplace of those lines of research? ...

To be honest, it's not my first time reading Hamlet, but I don't think I understand Shakespeare's tragedy very well. I feel more related when I read Shakespeare's Sonnets than his play. I guess the reason is that I don't have a closely related experience for the stories at that time and my experience in defining a tragedy is different from what Shakespeare would like to convey. I think only when I situate myself as the hero in the play, will I be able to build the connections. It's by that time would I be the one close to his mind, and feel Hamlet's hesitation of "to be or not to be". However, I do agree with SaesByul that play can serve the role of emotional development regardless of the difference in everyone's ZPD. Even though I cannot have the spontaneous experience of people at that time as a revenger killing the king, I can somehow portrait myself as the Hamlet in contemporary society. Just like Hamlet, I feel most situations as dilemma...

Sorry, I meant post-structuralism not post-modernism! https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=415&v=6a2dLVx8THA&feature=emb_logo A video that makes the concept easy.

"We naively believe that a writer wants to ‘express’ or ‘represent’ a psychology or a character. We rack our brains about  Hamlet—did  Shakespeare really  want  to express procrastination, or did he  want  to express something else? In point of fact, however, the artist does not represent or express any such thing, for he is not concerned with psychology. Nor do we go to see  Hamlet  to study psychology."  It is i nteresting that it seems play (not children’s play as a tool for getting spontaneous concepts, but a play written from writers), is also a good tool with which we can construct or reconstruct our understandings about anything and everything in general. Depending on content or genre, we may see some range of different messages that each reader takes. It makes it more interesting to see how differently readers digest and interpret the message that particularly speaks to them. I see that though readers develop and process their...

I read Hamlet in high school, and I saw a couple of different performances after reading it, but I generally don't remember much about Hamlet. I personally feel that this week's reading, The Tragedy of Hamlet, was beyond my Zone of Proximal Development. My everyday concepts (in particular, my familiarity with Hamlet and common critiques of it) are insufficient to really wrap my head around what Vygotsky is trying to say. This chapter seems quite dry, his writing focusing, especially at the beginning, on critiques of Hamlet made by others and his critiques of their critiques. I may try to add something more substantial to my post before class tonight, but I generally had difficulty with this reading.