SOURCE: Zamir, Tzachi. “Doing Nothing.” Mosaic: A Journal for the Interdisciplinary Study of Literature 35, no. 3 (September 2002): 167-82.

In the following essay, Zamir contends that Prince Hamlet's failure to avenge his father's death is the result of his fear of revealing his own individuality.

Some still-influential theories of meaning in philosophy have regarded the literary treatment of a philosophical concept to be informatively redundant (Ayer; Curtler; Stevenson). Such conceptions have important counterparts in Formalist aesthetics (e.g., Richards; Brooks) and are continuous with a long historical tradition both in the history of philosophy (Nussbaum, Love's 10-23) and in the history of rhetoric (Perelman).

The case against the knowledge-yielding capacities of literature comes in both a strong and a weak version. According to the strong version, informative discourse is exhausted by what may be termed “theoretical language”: “literal” (at least ideally) truth claims and argumentation. Philosophy is a “cognitive discipline...