Embodying wonder

pp. 131-138

in: Adam M. Cohen, Wonder in Shakespeare, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2012

Abstract

In "Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privileges of Partial Perspective," Donna Haraway enumerates a "doctrine of embodied objectivity" in which objective vision becomes possible as well as meaningful in a feminist context as a result of "partial perspective."¹ What Haraway refers to as a feminist version of objectivity "is about limited location and situated knowledge," rather than "transcendence and splitting of subject and object."² Just as our partial perspectives enable "us to become answerable for what we learn how to see," they also foreground the status of knowledge, and the knowing self, as part of a dynamic process with collaborative as well as ethical possibilities and responsibilities: " The knowing self is partial in all its guises, never finished, whole, simply there and original; it is always constructed and stitched together imperfectly and therefore able to join with another, to see together without claiming to be another."³ I have found Haraway's explanation of partial perspective and situated knowledge useful for approaching Adam Cohen's work in Wonder in Shakespeare, a project that opens with a powerful account of its critical positioning. In the introduction, Cohen locates his study of wonder within an autobiographical narrative of illness, in which the effects of a brain tumor transform and force him to renegotiate, among other things, his relationship with language and his approaches to Shakespeare.