Who Killed Shakespeare: What's Happened to English Since the Radical Sixties

by Patrick Brantlinger

Overview

First published in 2001. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780415930109
Publisher:	Taylor & Francis
Publication date:	07/23/2001
Pages:	248
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x (d)

About the Author

Patrick Brantlinger Rudy Professor of English at Indiana University. He is the author of several books, includingCrusoe's Footprints, published by Routledge. His other publications include Bread and Circuses, Fictions of State, The Reading Lesson: The Threat of Mass Literacy in Nineteenth-Century British Fiction and Rule of Darkness: British Literature and Imperialism, 1830-1914.

Table of Contents

1. Introduction: A View from the Ruins 2. Who Killed Shakespeare? What's Happened to English Since the Radical Sixties 3. English Departments as Heterotopias 4. Anti-Theory and Its Antithesis: Rhetoric vs. Ideology 5. How the New Historicism Grew Old (and Gained its Tale) 6. Postcolonialism and Its Discontents 7. Between Liberalism and Marxism: The Populism of Cultural Studies 8. Informania U 9. Apocalypse 2001: or, What Happens after Posthistory? 10. Works Citied

Editorial Reviews

Alas, poor Shakespeare. Students knew him well before the Age of Aquarius turned into the Information Age. Nowadays, it seems that the study of humanities has taken a backseat to more career-oriented fields such as business and computer science. Brantlinger (English, Indiana Univ.; Crusoe's Footprints) explains why Shakespeare is no longer a focal point of college education. After an introductory chapter outlining the thesis and the contents, Brantlinger takes the reader on an entertaining journey to uncover the truth behind Shakespeare's reputed death. If only the rest of the book were as delightful. Unfortunately, the remainder, filled with theories and studies of various philosophers and scholars, is far more complex and thus less accessible. Brantlinger's exploration of how cultural studies in universities have diminished in accordance with the shifting cultural and societal trends is timely and important, but readers unfamiliar with the study of English literature will glean little. Recommended only for academic and larger public libraries. Terry Christner Hutchinson P.L., KS Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.

Library Journal

"Brantlinger takes the reader on an entertaining journey to uncover the truth behind Shakespeare's reputed death. Brantlinger's exploration of how cultural studies in universities have diminished in accordance with the shifting cultural and societal trends is timely and important." — Library Journal
"Patrick Brantlinger's Who Killed Shakespeare? casts a cold and eminently rational eye on the English department wars of the last two decades. He gives us the first persuasive account at once of disciplinary debates and cultural conflicts that made English the major focus of disagreements over the status of theory and the aims of undergraduate education. People on both sides of these issues will find the book invaluable." — Cary Nelson, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
"In Who Killed Shakespeare? Pat Brantlinger maps the confusing terrain of much recent fashionable discourse concerning literary theory, postcolonialism, posthistory, and other similar topics with extraordinary authority and lucidity. In the process, he clarifies and resituates a number of current modes of academic investigation from cultural studies to informatics, and indicates that, beyond the border disputes between one or another theoretical approach, lies a larger threat not only to the academic world, but to the world at large. Who Killed Shakespeare? provides a sane, unflinching assessment of what academic studies are achieving today, and what they are not." — John Reed, Wayne State University
"Who Killed Shakespeare? is a wonderfully wise and witty book. Pat Brantlinger discusses how parochial attacks from the right and the left on the curriculum of English Departments miss their target, and suggests how large social changes have affected the nature and purpose of higher education. His critique of the 'corporatization' of American universities should be read by anyone interested in the future of education, which means all of us who form the reading public." — Martha Vicinus, University of Michigan
"Like Graff's Teaching the Conflicts, Guillory's Cultural Capital, or Readings' The University in Ruins, this is a candid and informed account of the humanities in market society. The chapter on the contradictions of English departments and English professors is stunning, the critiques of neopragmatism and new historicism are fearless, informatics are defined and their pay-off to universities laid bare, crash/theory and end-of-history optimists and pessimists are surveilled and swept before him. This is an angrier Brantlinger than we've seen, and an angrier criticism than we've seen for some time. Good." — Regenia Gagnier, author of The Insatiability of Human Wants

From the Publisher