The Antic Root: Shakespeare, Autopoiesis, and the Creation of the World

The Antic Root explores the relations among art, sense-experience, and the conception of the world in the early modern era. Against vitalist and posthumanist accounts that presume to grasp the world beyond its interpretive framing, Pye argues that any possibility of conceiving a world beyond us depends on acknowledging the fact of its mediated condition, a condition Shakespeare explored with particular acuity.

Rather than either a subjective or objective phenomenon, Pye shows how the world ...