Abstract
Thus far I have been at pains to suggest that it is only by attending to the way in which institutions such as the pretertiary school and the latter-day culture industry have served as privileged and even competing sources of dissemination that we can truly begin to locate Shakespeare extramurally, in perimillennial public culture in the United States. Moreover, it has been my contention that we must begin to speak of Shakespeare as public—that is, as a discursive object whose imaginative extensions belie the obsolete modernist division of culture into high and low, and whose material presence far exceeds any straightforward description. It is only in doing so that we can jettison the anachronistic and obfuscating assessment that Shakespeare remains principally the province of elites who, one hundred years ago, sought to ally him with hegemony and a racialized patrimony in the face of new immigration patterns, and whose legacy is presumed to persist virtually uninflected. As this study has tried to suggest, the subsequent work of the twentieth century has been to extend the reach of Shakespeare into the secondary school and even farther into the mass-educational apparatus, where familiarity with at least a handful of the plays has fueled a series of formations, from NEA initiatives to documentary and film adaptations. Even these cinematic conjurations of Shakespeare seldom escape what I’ve called the pedagogical imperative, however much they define themselves as antidotes to the schoolroom.
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Notes
Engaging with this domain is Richard Burt’s aim in Unspeakable ShaXXXspeares: Queer Theory and American Kiddie Culture (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1998).
Constance Penley, NASA/Trek: Popular Science and Sex in America (London: Verso, 1997).
Jack Zipes, “Traces of Hope: The Non-Synchronicity of Ernst Bloch,” in Not Yet: Reconsidering Ernst Bloch, ed. Jamie Owen Daniel and Tom Moylan (London: Verso, 1997), 1–12. The phrase “learned hope” is a translation of a concept, docta spes, associated with Bloch. I have generally benefited from the many insights concerning Bloch to be found in this collection.
Amy Scott-Douglass, Shakespeare Inside: The Bard behind Bars (Shakespeare Now!) (London: Continuum, 2007)
Jean Trounstine, Shakespeare behind Bars: The Power of Drama in a Women’s Prison (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2001)
Neils Herold, “Movers and Losers: Shakespeare in Charge and Shakespeare behind Bars,” in Native Shakespeares: Indigenous Appropriations on a Global Stage, ed. Craig Dionne and Parmita Kapadia (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2008), 153–179. See also the documentary Shakespeare behind Bars, directed by Hank Rogerson (Philomath Films, 2005).
Michael Warner has stressed the importance of coming into a relation with strangers as part of what it means to be a public; equally important, of course, is the abstractness of the position on offer. See Publics and Counterpublics (New York: Zone, 2000).
Courtney Lehmann, Shakespeare Remains: Theater to Film, Early Modern to Postmodern (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2002).
For a general sense of his position, see Alan Sinfield, Faultlines: Cultural Materialism and the Politics of Dissident Reading (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1992).
Jurgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (1962), trans. Thomas Burger (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1989).
Jonathan Dollimore, Radical Tragedy: Religion, Ideology, and Power in the Drama of Shakespeare and His Contemporaries (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), 191–195.
For a left critical analysis of the need to reimagine a public sphere, see John Frow, “Cultural Studies and the Neoliberal Imagination,” Yale Journal of Criticism 12, no. 2 (1999): 424–430.
Richard Dyer, “Entertainment and Utopia” in The Cultural Studies Reader, ed. Simon During (New York: Routledge, 1993), 271–283; the quoted passage appears on p. 273.
Gayatri Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?” in Marxism and the Interpretation of Cultures, ed. Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988), 271–313.
Lata Mani, “Cultural Theory, Colonial Texts: Reading Eye-Witness Accounts of Widow Burning,” Cultural Studies, ed. Lawrence Grossberg, Cary Nelson, and Paula Treichler (New York: Routledge, 1992), 392–394.
Stuart Hall uses the phrase “cultural dopes” in his useful analysis of debates around what counts as popular culture: “Notes on Deconstructing ‘The Popular,’” in People’s History and Socialist Theory, ed. Raphael Samuel (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1981), 227–240.
It is worth noting that even Spivak later pulled back from the strength of her assertion; see Gayatri Spivak, “Subaltern Talk: Interview with the Editors” in The Spivak Reader, ed. Donna Landry and Gerald Maclean (New York: Routledge, 1996), 287–308.
Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form: Twentieth-Century Dialectical Theories of Literature (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1971), 145–146.
Ernst Bloch, The Principle of Hope (1959), 3 vols., trans. Neville Plaice, Stephen Plaice, and Paul Knight (Cambridge: MA: MIT Press, 1986), 3.
Tony Bennett, Outside Literature (London: Routledge, 2000), 286.
Hugh Grady, Shakespeare’s Universal Wolf Studies in Early Modern Reification (New York: Clarendon Press, 1986)
Kiernan Ryan, “Marxism before Marx,” in Marxist Shakespeares, ed. Jean Howard and Scott Shershow (New York: Routledge, 2000), 227–244, esp. 227–230.
Susan Buck-Morss, Dreamworld and Catastrophe: The Passing of Mass Utopia in East and West (Cambridge, MA: MIT, 2000).
For how education reproduces class, see Paul Willis, Learning to Labor: How Working-Class Kids Get Working-Class Jobs (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982).
Nancy Fraser has provided a useful summary of the critical discourse on Habermas as well as a diagnosis aiming to recuperate the concept: see “Rethinking the Public Sphere: A Contribution to the Critique of Actually-Existing Democracy,” in The Phantom Public Sphere, ed. Bruce Robbins (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), 1–32.
For a critique of Habermas aiming to argue for a “proletarian public sphere,” see Oskar Negt and Alexander Kluge, Public Sphere and Experience: Towards an Analysis of the Bourgeois and Proletarian Public Spheres (1979), trans. Peter Labanyi, Jamie Owen Daniel, and Assenka Oksikoff (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993). See also Dana Polan, “The Public’s Fear: Or, Media as Monster in Habermas, Negt, and Kluge,” in Robbins, Phantom, 33–41; Fredric Jameson, “On Negt and Kluge,” in Robbins, Phantom, 42–74.
Arjun Appadurai and Carole Breckenridge, “Why Public Culture?” Public Culture 1, no. 1 (1988): 5–9; see also Igor Kopytoff, “Public Culture: A Durkheimian Genealogy,” Public Culture 1, no. 1 (1988): 11–16; and “Editors’ Comments,” Public Culture 1, no. 1 (1988): 1–4.
see also Igor Kopytoff, “Public Culture: A Durkheimian Genealogy,” Public Culture 1, no. 1 (1988): 11–16; and “Editors’ Comments,” Public Culture 1, no. 1 (1988): 1–4.
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© 2010 Denise Albanese
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Albanese, D. (2010). Social Dreaming and Making Shakespeare Matter. In: Extramural Shakespeare. Reproducing Shakespeare: New Studies in Adaptation and Appropriation. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230112940_6
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