Unhae Langis
Education
BA English Yale 1984, Maitrise U of Paris III (Sorbonne Nouvelle)1988, M Ed UCLA 1990, MA English UC Irvine 1995, PhD USC (U of Southern CA) 2008
Research Interests
Shakespeare, early modern drama, Renaissance literature
I like to explore the interactivity between self and others, body and environment, citizen and state in terms of moral agency, virtue, prudence, focusing on various nexus: mind-body, cognition-emotion, emotion-motion). Through the lens of eudaimonism (personal and civic flourishing), I also examine the common ground between various traditions of wisdom and philosophy, especially Aristotelian ethics (Nicomachean Ethics), Stoicism, Skepticism, Buddhism.
Education
Ph.D. University of Southern California English Literature 2008
M.A. University of California, Irvine English Literature 1995
M.Ed. University of California, Los Angeles English Education 1990
Maîtrise University of Paris, Sorbonne Nouvelle Literary translation 1988
B.A. Yale University, magna cum laude English 1984
Publications
Passion, Prudence, and Virtue in Shakespearean Drama. New York: Continuum Books, 2011.
Information and preview: http://www.continuumbooks.com/books/detail.aspx?BookId=157660&SubjectId=1020&Subject2Id=1387
Abstract: Virtue, as a Renaissance ideal, was largely conceived as a rational governing of unruly passions. Revising this early modern commonplace, my study shows how Shakespeare dramatizes a discerning Aristotelian conception of virtue as a touchstone of excellence: executing just action at the right time, in the right way, and for the right end within the contingent world. Not only situational, Aristotelian virtue is, moreover, integrative, harmonizing passion and reason, will and understanding, towards personal and civil good. Yet as a surprising backfire on the misogynist streak in Aristotle, the resistant female characters in Shakespeare emerge as the exemplars of ethical action, appropriating traditionally male-inflected virtue. At the junction of ethical criticism, historical phenomenology, and extended mind studies, this approach of prudential psychology bridges an apparent but needless divergence of critical focus between affect and cognition, ethics and prudential action. Firmly situated in new historicist practices, prudential psychology goes beyond discourses of power into the all-encompassing arena of virtue as the complete life, which recommends an equally interdisciplinary approach for a fuller understanding of Shakespeare’s works.
“The Aesth/ethics of Imagination and Deceit in Guare’s Six Degrees of Separation: A Foucauldian-Aristotelian Reading,” Pivot 1 (2011). http://pi.library.yorku.ca/ojs/index.php/pivot/article/viewFile/32160/29379
“Shakespeare and Prudential Psychology: Ambition and Akrasia in Macbeth.” Shakespeare Studies, Special Issue: Shakespeare and Moral Agency (forthcoming 2012)
“Usury and Political Friendship in Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice,” Upstart Crow [23 mss. pages; 2012]
“Virtue, Justice, and Moral Action in Shakespeare’s Hamlet.” Literature and Ethics: From the Green Knight to the Dark Knight. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2010. 53-75.
"Coriolanus: Inordinate Passions and Powers in Personal and Political Governance." Comparative Drama 44.1 (2010): 1-27. See "Papers" for hyperlink.
“The Role of the Intellectual: Shakespeare’s Exploration of Contemplative Life vs. Active Life in The Tempest.” The Intellectual: A Phenomenon in Multidimensional Perspectives. Inter-Disciplinary.net, 2010. Web. 22 July 2010.
“Virtuous Viragos: Female Heroism and Ethical Action in Shakespeare.” Literature Compass 7.6 (2010): 397-411.
“Idleness, Leisure, and Virtuous Activity in Shakespearean Drama.” Selected Papers of the Ohio Valley Shakespeare Conference 2 (2009): 1-16. https://ideaexchange.uakron.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?referer=https://www.google.com/&httpsredir=1&article=1014&context=spovsc
“Marriage, the Violent Traverse from Two to One in Taming and Othello.” Journal of the Wooden O Symposium 8 (2009): 45-63.
“Fate.” Encyclopedia of Themes in Literature. New York: Facts on File, 2010.
“Pride.” Encyclopedia of Themes in Literature. New York: Facts on File, 2010.
“Shakespeare’s Cleopatra as Virtuous Virago.” Genre: Women, Sexuality, a
BA English Yale 1984, Maitrise U of Paris III (Sorbonne Nouvelle)1988, M Ed UCLA 1990, MA English UC Irvine 1995, PhD USC (U of Southern CA) 2008
Research Interests
Shakespeare, early modern drama, Renaissance literature
I like to explore the interactivity between self and others, body and environment, citizen and state in terms of moral agency, virtue, prudence, focusing on various nexus: mind-body, cognition-emotion, emotion-motion). Through the lens of eudaimonism (personal and civic flourishing), I also examine the common ground between various traditions of wisdom and philosophy, especially Aristotelian ethics (Nicomachean Ethics), Stoicism, Skepticism, Buddhism.
Education
Ph.D. University of Southern California English Literature 2008
M.A. University of California, Irvine English Literature 1995
M.Ed. University of California, Los Angeles English Education 1990
Maîtrise University of Paris, Sorbonne Nouvelle Literary translation 1988
B.A. Yale University, magna cum laude English 1984
Publications
Passion, Prudence, and Virtue in Shakespearean Drama. New York: Continuum Books, 2011.
Information and preview: http://www.continuumbooks.com/books/detail.aspx?BookId=157660&SubjectId=1020&Subject2Id=1387
Abstract: Virtue, as a Renaissance ideal, was largely conceived as a rational governing of unruly passions. Revising this early modern commonplace, my study shows how Shakespeare dramatizes a discerning Aristotelian conception of virtue as a touchstone of excellence: executing just action at the right time, in the right way, and for the right end within the contingent world. Not only situational, Aristotelian virtue is, moreover, integrative, harmonizing passion and reason, will and understanding, towards personal and civil good. Yet as a surprising backfire on the misogynist streak in Aristotle, the resistant female characters in Shakespeare emerge as the exemplars of ethical action, appropriating traditionally male-inflected virtue. At the junction of ethical criticism, historical phenomenology, and extended mind studies, this approach of prudential psychology bridges an apparent but needless divergence of critical focus between affect and cognition, ethics and prudential action. Firmly situated in new historicist practices, prudential psychology goes beyond discourses of power into the all-encompassing arena of virtue as the complete life, which recommends an equally interdisciplinary approach for a fuller understanding of Shakespeare’s works.
“The Aesth/ethics of Imagination and Deceit in Guare’s Six Degrees of Separation: A Foucauldian-Aristotelian Reading,” Pivot 1 (2011). http://pi.library.yorku.ca/ojs/index.php/pivot/article/viewFile/32160/29379
“Shakespeare and Prudential Psychology: Ambition and Akrasia in Macbeth.” Shakespeare Studies, Special Issue: Shakespeare and Moral Agency (forthcoming 2012)
“Usury and Political Friendship in Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice,” Upstart Crow [23 mss. pages; 2012]
“Virtue, Justice, and Moral Action in Shakespeare’s Hamlet.” Literature and Ethics: From the Green Knight to the Dark Knight. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2010. 53-75.
"Coriolanus: Inordinate Passions and Powers in Personal and Political Governance." Comparative Drama 44.1 (2010): 1-27. See "Papers" for hyperlink.
“The Role of the Intellectual: Shakespeare’s Exploration of Contemplative Life vs. Active Life in The Tempest.” The Intellectual: A Phenomenon in Multidimensional Perspectives. Inter-Disciplinary.net, 2010. Web. 22 July 2010.
“Virtuous Viragos: Female Heroism and Ethical Action in Shakespeare.” Literature Compass 7.6 (2010): 397-411.
“Idleness, Leisure, and Virtuous Activity in Shakespearean Drama.” Selected Papers of the Ohio Valley Shakespeare Conference 2 (2009): 1-16. https://ideaexchange.uakron.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?referer=https://www.google.com/&httpsredir=1&article=1014&context=spovsc
“Marriage, the Violent Traverse from Two to One in Taming and Othello.” Journal of the Wooden O Symposium 8 (2009): 45-63.
“Fate.” Encyclopedia of Themes in Literature. New York: Facts on File, 2010.
“Pride.” Encyclopedia of Themes in Literature. New York: Facts on File, 2010.
“Shakespeare’s Cleopatra as Virtuous Virago.” Genre: Women, Sexuality, a
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Books by Unhae Langis
Not only situational, Aristotelian virtue is, moreover, integrative, harmonizing passion and reason, will and understanding, towards personal and civil good. Yet as a surprising backfire on the misogynist streak in Aristotle, the resistant female characters in Shakespeare emerge as the exemplars of ethical action, appropriating traditionally male-inflected virtue. At the junction of ethical, psycho-physiological, cultural and gender studies, this approach of prudential psychology bridges an apparent but needless divergence of critical focus between affect and cognition, ethics and prudential action. Firmly situated in new historicist practices, prudential psychology goes beyond narrow discourses of power into the all-encompassing arena of virtue as the complete life, which recommends an interdisciplinary approach for a fuller understanding of Shakespeare’s works.
Table of Contents
1 Introduction: Passion, Moderation, and Virtue in Early Modern England \ 2 The Taming of the Shrew: Kate’s Prudence over Petruccio’s Cleverness \ 3 Othello: Passion’s Perils in the Marital Traverse from Two to One \ 4 Living Well: Virtue, Means, and Ends in All’s Well That Ends Well \ 5 “Heavenly Mingle” in Antony and Cleopatra: Rare Virtue at the Nexus of Sex and Politics \ 6 Coriolanus: Inordinate Passions and Powers in Personal and Political Governance \ Afterword \ Bibliography \ Index
"
Papers by Unhae Langis
The cure for suffering, rooted in ignorance, is wisdom understood as the awareness that all phenomena lack intrinsic existence and that the self is a false belief without corresponding reality: though we may perceive our selves as tangible entities with dense mass, the world at the atomic or subatomic level is seamlessly interconnected and completely empty of self. Setting off a chain of actions within a matrix of nothing, suffering, and kindness, Lear comes to experience watershed moments of awakening during which he taps into something like Buddhist interbeing. Unencumbered by attachment and self-interest, he offers compassion to unfortunate others and envisions a Nirvana-like happiness of “singing like birds i’ the cage,” transcending the endless flow of contentious life into the very “mystery of things” (5.3.9, 16). Ultimately, when the audience must deal with Cordelia’s senseless death, a Buddhist response to adversity keys us into the equanimity, compassion, and prudential action also required to confront the various challenges ahead—pandemic, climate change, and persisting inequalities.
opportunity afforded by freedom from sustenance labour, ideally to develop virtue and perform political duties. Since the time of Plato and Aristotle, western society has engaged in an enduring debate between contemplative life and active life. While Plato and Aristotle privileged the philosophic life as supreme, their Roman counterparts such as Cicero and Seneca held more ambivalent, subtle, and sometimes convergent views about the two ways of life. This essay presents Shakespeare’s exploration of this ancient debate in The Tempest in the hopes that such an examination will engender self-reflexive insight on the relationship between intellectualism and sociopolitical engagement, between scholarship and service. Prospero learns through a hard-earned lesson the consequences of avoiding civic responsibility by retreating into his books. The Tempest underscores for present-day intellectuals the necessity despite the difficulty of straddling both the contemplative and active worlds: while knowledge sought for its own sake is always valuable, it also can and must be directed to benefit the world
surrounding us at the cost of a human debacle.
"The subject of deep controversy in the late 1500s, usury was a necessary fact of life during this era of burgeoning mercantilism, despite attempts to condemn and outlaw the commercial practice. As Lawrence Danson explains, “[f]armers needed to borrow to buy seed for next year’s crops; merchants needed to borrow to buy merchandise; and . . . without the incentive of interest, the flow of capital would dry up.” Indeed, the heavily indebted Bassanio of Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice reflects the financial situation of two-thirds of the Elizabethan peerage including Sir Philip Sidney, the Earl of Essex, the Earl of Leicester, the Earl of Southampton, and Queen Elizabeth. Not only did the aristocracy sustain itself through moneylending, the business of theater itself relied upon borrowed capital. Shakespeare’s company, the Lord Chamberlain’s Men, had to borrow money at high interest rates to build both the Theatre and the Globe. The law responded to these economic realities when Parliament in 1571 legalized moneylending at interest rates below ten percent, essentially the reinstatement of an Act of 1545.
Nonetheless, usury was universally denounced based on ancient and biblical interdictions that it was “against nature for money to beget money.” As Danson observes, the “scarcely perceived divergence between the economic realities that demanded the growth of credit and the economic theory that condemned it produced exacerbating tension,” if not gross discrepancies. As a commentary on English practices of usury, The Merchant of Venice underscores the hypocrisy underlying the morally condemned practice. Though usury was “a trade brought in by the Jews, now perfectly practiced almost by every Christian and so commonly that he is accounted but for a fool that doth lend his money for nothing,” the irrational equivalence of moneylender and Jew was indestructible: as Danson explains, “since in theory the business of making barren metal breed more metal was inimical to the right-minded Christian, then ipso facto the usurer must, despite the attest of eyes and ears, be Jewish,” literally and/or figuratively. The hypocritical practices of usury often involved, as Merchant depicts, a convenient scapegoating of the Jew while turning a blind eye to Christian usurers. Since the expulsion of the Jews from England in 1290, the usurers were of course English, most famous among them “a restricted circle of great London merchants, men who first made their money in overseas or retail trading and who then turned to the money-lending business.” The Merchant of Venice reveals how England sustains the commercial practice of usury through English moneylenders while maintaining the moral high ground by scapegoating the fictive Jew....""
Not only situational, Aristotelian virtue is, moreover, integrative, harmonizing passion and reason, will and understanding, towards personal and civil good. Yet as a surprising backfire on the misogynist streak in Aristotle, the resistant female characters in Shakespeare emerge as the exemplars of ethical action, appropriating traditionally male-inflected virtue. At the junction of ethical, psycho-physiological, cultural and gender studies, this approach of prudential psychology bridges an apparent but needless divergence of critical focus between affect and cognition, ethics and prudential action. Firmly situated in new historicist practices, prudential psychology goes beyond narrow discourses of power into the all-encompassing arena of virtue as the complete life, which recommends an interdisciplinary approach for a fuller understanding of Shakespeare’s works.
Table of Contents
1 Introduction: Passion, Moderation, and Virtue in Early Modern England \ 2 The Taming of the Shrew: Kate’s Prudence over Petruccio’s Cleverness \ 3 Othello: Passion’s Perils in the Marital Traverse from Two to One \ 4 Living Well: Virtue, Means, and Ends in All’s Well That Ends Well \ 5 “Heavenly Mingle” in Antony and Cleopatra: Rare Virtue at the Nexus of Sex and Politics \ 6 Coriolanus: Inordinate Passions and Powers in Personal and Political Governance \ Afterword \ Bibliography \ Index
"
The cure for suffering, rooted in ignorance, is wisdom understood as the awareness that all phenomena lack intrinsic existence and that the self is a false belief without corresponding reality: though we may perceive our selves as tangible entities with dense mass, the world at the atomic or subatomic level is seamlessly interconnected and completely empty of self. Setting off a chain of actions within a matrix of nothing, suffering, and kindness, Lear comes to experience watershed moments of awakening during which he taps into something like Buddhist interbeing. Unencumbered by attachment and self-interest, he offers compassion to unfortunate others and envisions a Nirvana-like happiness of “singing like birds i’ the cage,” transcending the endless flow of contentious life into the very “mystery of things” (5.3.9, 16). Ultimately, when the audience must deal with Cordelia’s senseless death, a Buddhist response to adversity keys us into the equanimity, compassion, and prudential action also required to confront the various challenges ahead—pandemic, climate change, and persisting inequalities.
opportunity afforded by freedom from sustenance labour, ideally to develop virtue and perform political duties. Since the time of Plato and Aristotle, western society has engaged in an enduring debate between contemplative life and active life. While Plato and Aristotle privileged the philosophic life as supreme, their Roman counterparts such as Cicero and Seneca held more ambivalent, subtle, and sometimes convergent views about the two ways of life. This essay presents Shakespeare’s exploration of this ancient debate in The Tempest in the hopes that such an examination will engender self-reflexive insight on the relationship between intellectualism and sociopolitical engagement, between scholarship and service. Prospero learns through a hard-earned lesson the consequences of avoiding civic responsibility by retreating into his books. The Tempest underscores for present-day intellectuals the necessity despite the difficulty of straddling both the contemplative and active worlds: while knowledge sought for its own sake is always valuable, it also can and must be directed to benefit the world
surrounding us at the cost of a human debacle.
"The subject of deep controversy in the late 1500s, usury was a necessary fact of life during this era of burgeoning mercantilism, despite attempts to condemn and outlaw the commercial practice. As Lawrence Danson explains, “[f]armers needed to borrow to buy seed for next year’s crops; merchants needed to borrow to buy merchandise; and . . . without the incentive of interest, the flow of capital would dry up.” Indeed, the heavily indebted Bassanio of Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice reflects the financial situation of two-thirds of the Elizabethan peerage including Sir Philip Sidney, the Earl of Essex, the Earl of Leicester, the Earl of Southampton, and Queen Elizabeth. Not only did the aristocracy sustain itself through moneylending, the business of theater itself relied upon borrowed capital. Shakespeare’s company, the Lord Chamberlain’s Men, had to borrow money at high interest rates to build both the Theatre and the Globe. The law responded to these economic realities when Parliament in 1571 legalized moneylending at interest rates below ten percent, essentially the reinstatement of an Act of 1545.
Nonetheless, usury was universally denounced based on ancient and biblical interdictions that it was “against nature for money to beget money.” As Danson observes, the “scarcely perceived divergence between the economic realities that demanded the growth of credit and the economic theory that condemned it produced exacerbating tension,” if not gross discrepancies. As a commentary on English practices of usury, The Merchant of Venice underscores the hypocrisy underlying the morally condemned practice. Though usury was “a trade brought in by the Jews, now perfectly practiced almost by every Christian and so commonly that he is accounted but for a fool that doth lend his money for nothing,” the irrational equivalence of moneylender and Jew was indestructible: as Danson explains, “since in theory the business of making barren metal breed more metal was inimical to the right-minded Christian, then ipso facto the usurer must, despite the attest of eyes and ears, be Jewish,” literally and/or figuratively. The hypocritical practices of usury often involved, as Merchant depicts, a convenient scapegoating of the Jew while turning a blind eye to Christian usurers. Since the expulsion of the Jews from England in 1290, the usurers were of course English, most famous among them “a restricted circle of great London merchants, men who first made their money in overseas or retail trading and who then turned to the money-lending business.” The Merchant of Venice reveals how England sustains the commercial practice of usury through English moneylenders while maintaining the moral high ground by scapegoating the fictive Jew....""