Technically Alive Shakespeare's Sonnets

This insightful study treats William Shakespeare's Sonnets as philosophical poetry. Connecting contemporary debates about what counts as life to twentieth century debates about technology to their early modern roots, John Michael Archer considers these poems outside the conventional succession of periods that are alternately said to contain or convey them. Drawing on the later writings of Martin Heidegger and using the writings of Aristotle, Plato, Nietzsche, and Agamben as a vital counterpoint to Heidegger, the argument interweaves its readings of technology as philosophical concept in the Sonnets with the poetic cycle's depictions of life and living beings.

John Michael Archer is a professor in the department of English at New York University and the author of previous three books, most recently Citizen Shakespeare: Freemen and Aliens in the Language of the Plays (Palgrave Macmillan, 2005).