Plays (e.g., Hamlet) as simulated learning contexts to drive you to emotional awareness or ZPD


"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 interesting 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 socialization to deeper levels through reading or watching plays, it also occurs that plays are read and evaluated by readers in accordance with their states, interests, tastes, beliefs, etc. My point here is some plays such as Hamlet also can be read totally differently and additionally given novel meanings depending on our ways of interpretation and approach, which I think shows how we, social (or societal) entities interact and (re)construct our ZPD in our daily lives. I think it is still possible for a person who hasn’t got over a certain level of ZPD* to actually reach that level by indirectly experiencing some emotional and social events during plays: Plays can become simulated contexts for people to put themselves in inexperienced situations, which may enable them to enact perspective takings as well. If the situations that appear during plays provide somewhat similar contexts with what people experienced previously, though they had not achieved emotional awareness, plays can also trigger the audience to go deeper into the realization either by resonating with the figures or taking their perspectives, which then I believe can actually lead them to better understand their surrounded people in their past or current lives.    

*Though ZPD might have originally meant to refer to our leap of understanding where we grasp scientific concepts to the levels we use them as daily concepts, I don’t think ZPD can only explain our understanding of academically related concepts. Here, I would like to apply ZPD more broadly in understanding humanity-related concepts as well such as love, hate, complexities of mixed feelings, helplessness, laying down, sacrifice, etc.: I believe plays can be good tools for us to ‘learn’ or ‘develop’ some of these concepts in relation to our lives.

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