ABSTRACT
The central question engaged by the work on display in this book-both the literary scholarship and the labour of the characters in the plays under investigation-is of an existential nature. Understanding the motivations for various human activities and relations along the lines of what the author have called an avoidance-acknowledgment continuum rather than or besides a knowledge-ignorance spectrum represents one sort of response to this notion, but certainly nothing like a complete one. In first place, it is profoundly dubious that anything like a 'complete' response, where this completeness would be embodied in an abstract or general formula, exists at all: searching for such completeness would both beg and deflect the question. In second place, the very assertion of and reliance upon the concepts of acknowledgment and avoidance in studying literature, in particular, risks precisely the reification of a method, of a certain form of theoretically approaching the task of reading that such concepts were originally invoked to circumvent.
