Prospero's Planet. Critical Quandaries around Shakespeare's Last Play - Andrei Zlatescu

  Stormy things do come and go, but Shakespeare's last tribute to human perfidy and awe kept coming back for the past four centuries. Andrei Zlatescu charts off the enigmatic Tempest's interpretations in an orderly, solid and original afterplay, itself staged so as to guide the perplexed, contain the wild and coddle the lover of intempestive festivities. 

Calin-Andrei Mihailescu 

  The rightful Duke of Milan does not belong to the time of his determinate condition as a shipwrecked aristocrat. By recourse to magic, Prospero masters the future, reversing his fate and staging an ultimate revenge against his usurpers, Sebastian and Antonio. An anti-cathartic play, whose meaning has been disputed for centuries by English culture's loftiest minds, The Tempest can be read as a dramatized manual of imperial politics - one that inaugurates the conventions of modern propaganda, where alternative futures are channeled through theatricalized politics. 

Andrei Zlatescu

  Andrei Zlatescu is presently serving as an expert with U. N. Human Rights Committee. He has taught Community Theory and Human Rights for The Faculty of Political Science with The University of Bucharest. He previously served as an Assistant Professor in Global Studies with The Faculty of Information and Media Studies at Western University, in London, Ontario (2010-110, and as a Professor with Fanshawe College in London, Ontario (2010-13). Between 2003 and 2010, he taught General Studies for The Faculty of Communication and Culture at University of Calgary. In 2010, he organized a field-course in Applied Community Studies and Human Rights (Cultural Ecologies) in Ecuador’s Coastal, Andean, and Upper Amazon regions. His PhD in Comparative Literature is from the University of Alberta, Office of Interdisciplinary Studies. The present piece is an adaptation of several theoretical chapters from his dissertation, “The Tempest as a Pretext. Shakespeare’s Last Major Play and The New Allegories of Order,” defended in 2008. The author also holds an M. A. in Comparative Literature from The University of Western Ontario (1998) with a thesis on utopian thought. He has researched and published in the fields of Comparative Literature, Cultural Anthropology, History of Ideas, and Community Studies. His passion for poetry and fiction writing has generated so far a literary debut in the collective work “Fictiuni” (with the members of Clubul Literar, 1991) and a second collective volume, “Versuri” – (forthcoming in 2014).