It's a good thing if people read Shakespeare, who really is wonderful, and Dante and Chaucer and Homer and Goethe, etc. I am not sure why an employer would care if a graduate applicant for a job had a good liberal arts education. I'd want her/him to be a able to read and understand instructions and whatever material was relevant to the job, write plain comprehensible English pretty quickly, and be numerate enough to deal with basic arithmetic and understand probabilities.
That's a lot to ask, but a Great Books Course is no more likely to produce that person than an education that, like many these days, involves no humanities -- just business, accounting, finance, "practical" courses, one one that involves a certain amount of reading Alice Walker and Toni Morrison. The number of people who do anything with "critical theory" and cultstud is infinitesimal. Just speak anecdotally of my time in the working world among supposedly highly educated lawyers, many from elite schools, I have met exactly one person, who happens to be another OSU Law grad, who could talk about Foucault, or cared to. Or, probably, who had heard of Foucault.
In the old days of the debate around The Closing of the American Mind I used to have this one out with friends who like then them taught at non-elite institutions (and here I am back again), and generally got them to concede that this tempest in a teapot is irrelevant to the actual work that goes on in required humanities courses, which is basic composition. Even the fiercest anti-Alan Bloomians, pro-new curriculum, studies people admitted that the struggle on the ground was to get students to read ANYTHING ands how some understanding, and the fiercest Alan Bloomian Traditionalists admitted that they'd be very happy if a student submitted a thoughtful, literate, reflective paper on The Color Purple. Good luck on thoughtful, literate, reflective at all.
Bardolotry. It's signifier, as they say in the CultStud biz, of culcha, as Einstein is of brains, you don't have to understand either of them, you are supposed to be reverent. There is some work on how this happened to WS, I think it's a phenomenon of the 19th century. Before that people had little reverence for WS.
He himself who would be amused and appalled. After all, WS never bothered to publish his own dramatic work (unlike Jonson), that's how much he thought of it. He knew it was good, that's obvious. but it seems to have been for him a means to an end, a good income, a coat of arms, some chance to rub shoulders and maybe other body parts with the elite.
I think it's a very mixed blessing. On one hand it does do something to keep classic theater going, what with Shakespeare in the Park, the Chicago Shakespeare Theater, Stratford (Ontario and England), etc. People do tend to go to it dutifully and blankly because they are Supposed To, as they go to the opera, not really enjoying or understanding it. That's not because they didn't have enough WS in English in college, the people who go probably did have WS in English in college.
The reverent attitude dulls the critical faculties. It also crowds the stage. When was the last time you saw a play by Jonson or Webster or Marlowe produced? A nice little theater here did Webster's Duchess of Malfi and you bet I dropped everything and ran to see it before it disappeared. Bardolatry creates a sort of monopoly market. On the other hand it does create a market.
People like Cheney like Bardolotry because it once provided them with a useful stick to uphold the superiority of Western culcha, defined negatively as everything the cultstud crowd doesn't like. I put that in the past tense because that was 20 years ago, and besides the wench is dead. i wouldn't worry too much about LC trying to revive the debate.
--- Tayssir John Gabbour <tayssir.john at googlemail.com> wrote:
> On 4/25/07, Carrol Cox <cbcox at ilstu.edu> wrote:
> > Picked up on another list, reference to a
> "report," issued by the
> > American Council of Trustees and Alumni (ACTA)
> (which is headed by Lynne
> > Cheney), entitled "The Vanishing Shakespeare" and
> condemns English
> > departments around the country for abandoning
> traditional authors such
> > as Shakespeare and teaching courses in popular
> culture and theory. It
> > urges alumni, students and parents to demand
> change at their various
> > universities.
> >
> >
>
http://www.goacta.org/publications/Reports/VanishingShakespeare.pdf
>
> Why don't these bardolators argue against
> intellectual property?
> Shakespeare and his fellow writers were free to
> "steal" stories that
> other people wrote and rework them. While nowadays,
> Time Warner owns
> the "Happy Birthday" song and probably demands up to
> $10,000 in
> royalties for performing it.
>
> I looked at the link, and these writer-worshippers
> are appalled that:
>
> "English majors can avoid reading Othello in
> favor of studying:
> 'Critical Race Theory,' which explores why race
> 'continue[s] to
> have vital significance in politics, economics,
> education,
> culture, arts, and everyday social realities"
> including
> 'sexuality, class, disability, multiculturalism,
> nationality, and
> globalism.'"
>
>
> The problem isn't that there's no one around to
> teach Shakespeare --
> merely that students aren't REQUIRED to study it.
> After all, they
> can't think for themselves. The real stakeholders
> are:
>
> "Employers -- especially newspapers, publishers,
> schools, and
> others who hire English majors -- should be
> deeply concerned. So
> should parents, alumni, trustees, and interested
> citizens."
>
>
> Bardolatry fascinates me. I don't get it. If someone
> does, I'd be
> grateful for their explanation.
>
>
> Tayssir
> ___________________________________
>
http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/mailman/listinfo/lbo-talk
>
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