9-19-22 Allen Cardoza Interviews Paula Marantz Cohen
https://drexel.edu/pennoni/center-for-civil-discourse/overview/http://answers.networkAn award-winning scholar and teacher explores how Shakespeareâs greatest characters were built on a learned sense of empathy.
While discussing Shakespeareâs plays in her university classroom, Paula Marantz Cohen discovered that they unlocked a surprising sense of compassion in both herself and her students. In this short and illuminating book, she shows how Shakespeareâs genius lay in his ability to arouse empathy, even when his characters exist in alien contexts and behave in reprehensible ways.
In her new book, On Human Kindness, Paul Cohen takes her readers through a selection of Shakespeareâs most famous plays, including Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, and The Merchant of Venice, to demonstrate the ways in which Shakespeare thought deeply and clearly about how we treat âthe other.â Cohen argues that only through close reading of Shakespeare can we fully appreciate his empathetic responses to race, class, gender, and age. Wise, eloquent, and thoughtful, this book is a forceful argument for literatureâs power to champion what is best in us.